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Get off my lawn!
idiolect:
I guess it doesn't make that much sense legally speaking not to have the drinking age be 18 in the U.S., just because at that point you are no longer a minor. Is there any justification for it beyond that legislators just like it better that way?
Also, I really hope the driving age here stays as low as it is. This is a giant country with lots of wide open spaces and, for the most part, terrible transportation even if you do live in or near a city -- if you raised the driving age to 18, it would really suck for a lot of kids just on a personal level, you'd probably be removing or at least seriously limiting part of the workforce (no 17 year olds driving to after school or summer jobs), and it would put a number of unnecessary strains on their parents.
I can't help but wonder if for both driving and drinking the case isn't just that newbies to these things tend to suck much more often than experienced people. Surely youth are more prone to risky behavior than middle-aged people, but I'm not sure, on balance, that there's that much difference between how risky people are willing to be at 18 and at 21 (-- surely it does change for individual people, I mean the entire demographic on the whole).
--- Quote from: calenlass on 11 Mar 2008, 21:23 ---Also, losing my beloved Integra to a drunken shit ass bastard who tried to fucking drive away doesn't change my opinion on the drinking age laws, but it makes me want harsher punishments for driving under the influence of anything. Fucking shitcock.
--- End quote ---
Yeah, definitely with you on that.
Elizzybeth:
When I was eleven, one rainy evening during Thanksgiving weekend, my mother put my brother and I through a terrifying twenty-minute ride (on the wrong side of the road, sometimes) before running a red light, crashing into another car, then spinning around and hitting a stoplight so hard it fell over. I had known, when we got into the car, that she was too drunk to drive, and I felt awful knowing that I had almost asked my dad not to let her drive us but didn't have the balls to follow through.
Thankfully, no one got seriously injured, and spending a couple of hours in jail and losing her license actually allowed my mom to realize that she'd been an alcoholic for seven or eight years and needed to stop drinking, but at that point, I promised myself that I'd never drink. At about the same time, because my parents both smoke pot, I vowed never to smoke. It's hard to rebel against a couple of hippies, really.
I've managed to politely decline the now-almost-weekly invitations that I get to smoke pot with my increasingly drug-minded friends (one close friend and one acquaintance have started dealing in the past year), and I've kept my drinking so far to very occasional, very light social drinking. Will I continue to be such a prude? I don't know. But for now, that's how I'm different from my parents.
E. Spaceman:
--- Quote from: jill the ripper on 11 Mar 2008, 18:31 ---
--- Quote from: Barmymoo on 09 Mar 2008, 11:02 ---I call my teachers by their first names, for example.
--- End quote ---
Um, what?
No.
When you get a college degree, or at least are a good ways out of high school, you may call an ex-teacher by their first name. Teachers demand respect, even if they personally do not call for it. They are their to school you, not to be your best buddy, and deserve recognition thus. They are either Mr., Miss, Mrs., Ma'am, or Sir. Behind their back, maybe, just their last name.
That's not a generation thing. That's just a you thing. And stop doing it, you're going to run into trouble one day.
I'm obviously touchy about this, sorry.
--- End quote ---
I call people by their first name, or the name i find more appropiate for them. This is obviously due to a fundamental difference in how we look at life, I don't think I should give respect to anyone by their mere position, how we interact swill determine whether or not i give you respect.
Teachers were paid to teach me, the tuition i paid provided for their wages. They were given a payment for their services, expecting a special treatment above that seems ludicrous to me.
In any case, my teachers would be more concerned about me learning to use "their/there" correctly than how I address them.
calenlass:
You guys are weird. I only address my professors as "Professor". I used to address the ones I knew outside of class as "Coach" instead, because they were generally coaches of intramural stuff. The only people who get addressed as some equivalent of "sir" or "ma'am" are my spanish professors, who become "seņor" or "seņora", which is actually like saying "mister" or "misses" (sir would be "don" and ma'am would be "dama", and that is antiquated and weird).
idiolect:
--- Quote from: E. Spaceman on 11 Mar 2008, 23:23 ---I call people by their first name, or the name I find more appropiate for them. (emphasis added)
--- End quote ---
Whoa whoa whoa! Call people by whatever name that they ask you to call them by, not whatever you decide on. Jeez.
--- Quote ---This is obviously due to a fundamental difference in how we look at life, I don't think I should give respect to anyone by their mere position, how we interact swill determine whether or not i give you respect.
Teachers were paid to teach me, the tuition i paid provided for their wages. They were given a payment for their services, expecting a special treatment above that seems ludicrous to me.
In any case, my teachers would be more concerned about me learning to use "their/there" correctly than how I address them.
--- End quote ---
And if you don't like dealing with certain things like being asked to call people by their last names, you can leave and take your money with you and give it to whatever crazy hippie school is letting you call people by their first names only. Also, you're totally wrong on the "respect" issue too -- other human beings in general but especially your ostensible superiors should start out with some amount of respect from you in whatever way is relevant. From that point forward, they can gain a special amount of respect from you if they do something especially excellent, or they can lose respect if they treat you badly. I always worry about people who seem to think everyone walks around having no respect for each other from the get-go. (Alternately, I don't like it when such people say things like that to me directly, because of the implied demand that I start thinking about how to impress them and gain their respect. Ew).
Also, if your idea of what teachers have to offer is still in the realm of there/their/they're stuff, then... wow. Well, keep plugging away and maybe some day they'll let you read a whole book.
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