This back and forth was a rollercoaster.
I’d like to wonder out loud, “what does the word ‘edgy’ actually mean?”
We speak a variety of languages. Some of us speak many. I’m only at one and a half myself. So due to my lack of understanding of many of the cluster’s languages, I’d ask for people to describe the concept of being “edgy” (however that translates back to you) in your own words.
Well, some people are kind of… ‘round’. Like a smiley 
You say smth they disagree on, they just say ‘I disagree ’, you kick em hard - they just roll with the same smiley in place (rolling sounds). No matter where you kick - it’d just roll em around, no hard feelings. Impossible to piss off, barely ever piss off anyone themselves.
Edgy people thou - they have edges all over the place 
. You were just having a casual small talk, then oops - here’s an edge - you cut yourself. You keep on chatting - oh, here’s their sensitive edge - they’re on the edge of tearing you to pieces all of a sudden. And even if they say to you “You are the most lovely person in the universe, I’m having such a great time chatting with you. Spirits bless you, good soul!”, there still some kind of edge to it - smth that makes you feel they’re either mocking you or trying to catch you off-guard and backstab with an edgy knife. Especially if you’re edgy yourself 
For me, ‘edgy’ looks like something that other people suppose to be “sharp and impersonally offensive”. From my point of view the word looks like something positive, though as I got a feeling of that, it gets a negative connotation otherwise in the media. Well, why I imagine Veik as a person like that - she openly was saying things like “she is a villain” and just tries deliberately to do things that other people consider bad.
It reminds me of other words I caught from galnets, a ‘troll’ - a person who tries to annoy other people in the media by any means necessary, and the best example of that is probably Arrendis.
Though for me these are just minor problems of the boards. The largest threat to conversations I believe are those scum who start to discuss the author instead of ideas.
You (and probably the rest of the readers) should know very well Mr. Nauplius. I won’t attach epitets to him, I’ll just say that I disagree with him on a quite range of ideas and will prefer to see him behind the bars for his crimes, disregarding that most of the time I speak with him, we both manage to keep rather civil conversations. On the other hand, there is quite a range of idiots who pretend to be better than Mr. Nauplius, but instead of disagreeing with me, their arguments come down to nonsence like “you said that because you are this this and this”.
There are people who are undoubtfully a criminal, but they can be negotiated with. And there is this filth and scum who are better to be just shot on sight instead of trying to talk with them.
I don’t know it there is a good word to describe these nuisances, if there is, I’d like to know.
And even better, I’d like to know how to deal with them. I know if they’d try that in space, I’d just shoot’em down. If they’d try it in person, my fist would meet their nose. But if they do this crap on forums I have no better idea than feed them with the same treatment and just go full ad hominem attacks against them.
Well, that was my example of being edgy. I spoke my sincere thoughts, I was quite offensive, and I brought up a real problem that annoys me and showed that I am looking for hard solutions and not comrpomises.
Edgy behaviour is seeking to say or do something controversial without crossing the line where rules would be enforced.
For example if the rules prohibit xenophobic statements, then edginess would be to make obfuscating statements that in themselves aren’t xenophobic, but which as a whole are xenophobic.
Essentially riding the edge of the rules. Often as a form of anti authority statement.
It can be quite annoying behaviour.
Hm. Well, that could be one manifestation.
The way I understand it, @Arsia_Elkin, is that “edginess” is actually a criticism based not so much on the notion that someone is dark-minded as on the sense that their darkness is in some way a front.
There’s a tendency, rightly or not, to think of brooding, aggressive, and dangerous people as having some depth to them. Where did this character come from? What have they seen or learned that causes them to reject social norms and even, often, the pleasant warmth of normal human contact? It’s difficult to see into dark waters, so a person who’s opaque in this way may appear to be very “deep” indeed.
To accuse someone of being “edgy” is to imply that what I’ve just described is a front, that this person is in fact about as “deep” and interesting as a particularly murky puddle. It’s the characteristic that makes it insulting or, as Veik correctly suggests, an expression of contempt.
Note, also, though, that responding to the accusation by implying that you’re getting yourself sneered at on purpose for strategic advantage is a very characteristically edgy tactic, since all at once it (1) hints at great, unseen depths; (2) provides no evidence of these depths beyond implying they exist (which is the whole point of being “edgy”) and in fact invokes the lack of evidence itself as evidence; and (3) undercuts itself because someone who really wants to be underestimated won’t tell you that, certainly not in a public forum.
(Oh, but what if that’s what they WANT you to think? Ooo! Spooky! … Return to start, repeat as desired.)
So when Ms. Malitia accuses me of being,
what she’s actually saying is not only that I’m dark but that I’m superficially, even boringly dark (and also, by her account, probably mentally ill). That isn’t really subject to direct rebuttal especially since I’m well aware myself that even disregarding the whole “damaged infomorph” thing I’m a little bit of a damaged person. Maybe almost all of us are, but, whatever.
See, one of the things about having a “dark” or “brooding” persona is that, well, it is hard to see how deep it is. Someone calling me edgy is basically just saying I’m dark (obvious) and there’s really not much to me (hard to directly refute without supporting the allegation). So I just point her somewhere that seems like it fits the trope she’s invoking a bit better, and otherwise shrug it off.
If she speaks truth, that’s something to notice. If not, well. Eh? She’s a kybernaut, so, what was I expecting? Integrity and good judgment?
(If I start to hear the same observation from people who know me better, that might be a good time to do a little reassessment.)
Well that’s one of the other sides of the coin, Aria. They’re all related phenomena.
To use my example about xenophobia, it’s similar to constructing a long IGS essay asserting that the different cultures of New Eden place different values on various aspects of a person, and that in say ancient Garoun, it was charisma rather than diligence or piety or martial prowess that was the most culturally important attribute of a person, and that this cultural legacy persists to the modern era, leading to radically divergent views on what is proper in society.
I.e. ““Gallente are lazy stupid degenerates”” which you wouldn’t ordinarily get away with saying.
And then it is revealed at some point that it wasn’t really a deeply held belief, but rather something made up largely on the spot, and posted not to make a point about society, or to rally people to act against that sort of behaviour, but rather it was posted because the act of posting was the goal.
Um. This seems like a silly thing to get hung up on, but, just how many sides do your coins have, Dr. Valate?
Her coins are subtle dodecagons, so they have 14 sides, 12 of which … are all edge. 
Since we were speaking about words and their meaning, I’d like to extend your example, but direct it in a different way: what exactly a xenophobia is?
Would you call me a xenophobe, for example? I won’t deny that I despise jaijii and especially gallentean swines. But if someone will call me a xenophobe in person, likely I’ll just break her nose that instant. And if she call me xenophobe on the forums, I’ll immedially claim she is idiot and liar, because for me it’s an offensive and untrue insult.
Xenophobia is a word with two roots, first one means aliens, which could be just foreigners, outsiders, jaijii. Second is… fear. Calling me like that would imply that I am afraid of jaijii. Do I look like I am afraid of jaijii?
I won’t say that all jaijii do disgusting crap, but majority of them do. They can walk showing their skin, they can show disrespect to house or business owners, in the end they could just walk into living room wearing street boots. Are you going to tolerate that? Me? I’d grab a jaijii by her neck and push her nose down to the dirt they brought into room on the soles of her boots so she’d understand why she should have taken them off.
Because I afraid of no jaijii.
You know what real xenophobe would do? She would tremble in the corner, afraid even to SAY to jaijii she did it wrong by entering the room with footwear on, beucase she were afraid to insult her whatever nonsence, or because she’s afraid of her. Xenobphobia makes you tolerant to offensive behavior of the jaijii, it makes you a coward and spineless weakling, who will be stepped on like a doormat and on whom jaijiis will wipe their boots, and the next moment they will force you to praise their democracy, freedom and similar inhumane nonsence, while abandoning your family, your duties, or your Faith, just anything they will want and what will stand on their way of subjugating you. If you are afraid of them, if you can’t tell them what you think of them and tell them to stop the crap they’re doing, they can do whatever they want to you.
And that is a disgrace.
The physical coins are of course conventional metal discs, though somea are thick enough, with square enough rims, that it’s a non-zero possibility that you could have one land upright, if tossed onto a suitable surface.
The virtual coin, for the purpose of metaphor, can have as many sides as necessaryb. Because “another face of the same dice” isn’t a recognised metaphor.
b. Probably not odd numbers though since e.g. trying to imagine a regular polyhedron with 5 sides distracts the reader.
That’s the spirit ! Saying something that is false but is believable.
Whoa, did I miss it, Arrendis actually said something believable? 
While the two roots exists, the endpoint word used has a different connotative and denotative meaning.
In this instance, for Xenophobia’s denotative(or dictionary) meaning is not fear of foreigners, but a sharp disdain or prejudice(or even hatred) of foreigners. Xenophobia, connotatively, is a negative. This of course will vary, especially with translations, but not everything cleanly breaks down in the way you tried to do so. Especially in linguistics
Something interesting I have noticed in dialects of Caldanese and Napani both is, that the connotation for xenophobia(as with many things) varies a great deal depending on context, and the specific dialects themselves. Even sub-dialects of a given corporate parlance can have a different outlook on the usage of the word.
So, not to make any personal statements about you, specifically, Diana, but there’s two things you could consider.
First, on the term itself:
‘Xenophobia’, like many other sociology terms expressed as ‘-phobia’ isn’t actually about direct and immediate fear. It’s about bias. Specifically “dislike of or prejudice against people of other nations.”
While the specific term used in this case has a ‘-phobia’ partial root, equivalent terms are ‘ethnocentrism’, ‘jingoism’, ‘isolationism’, and ‘radical nationalism’. The ‘-phobia’ category seems to have caught on as a catch-all usage because it’s, well, catchy. It’s an easy thing to group things into those categories, even if ‘fear’ isn’t a direct part in the behaviors that express. A more common immediate behavior tends to be aggression—including but not limited to violence. Aggressive responses can be as mild as derision or an expectation of poor behavior, even if the individual hasn’t yet demonstrated any poor behavior.
Digging deeper, though, fear does play a strong role in fomenting those behaviors and biases. Usually, this isn’t a conscious fear. This isn’t something where the biased individual is aware of feeling afraid. Rather, it’s the same undercurrent that triggers the aggression in the first place.
Aggression, after all, is a fear response. All aggression, all anger, is rooted in fear.
Think of something that makes you angry. Anything at all. It will, invariably, be something you feel is ‘not right’. It can as simple as something being out of place, someone you don’t like being present or speaking, someone speaking out of turn. Anything that offends propriety or presents any conditions that are not desired can trigger anger. That’s not to say that it always does, but it can. And it’s useful to understand why, especially in terms of societal ‘-phobias’.
Things that aren’t as they should be, that aren’t as we desire them, are a challenge to our desired order and outcome. From the innocuous and ephemeral matters like ‘where did I leave my nail clippers?’ to ‘something wants to eat me’, and definitely including ‘that bastard is tracking dirt into my clean and orderly home’, they constitute a challenge to the patterns our brains expect.
Our brains are pretty much hard-wired to want patterns to match expectations. We work very hard to make sure our personal patterns conform to the expected patterns… or at least, appear to do so well enough for us to feel like they do. When things don’t match the expected and desired patterns… something is wrong. Either the outside world is not conforming to the behaviors it should, or our understanding of our patterns is wrong. The potential exists that our brain is not matching and predicting patterns properly. That there is something wrong with us.
None of that process occurs at the level of conscious thought. Anyone with any interest in the study of the human mind, by now, should be very well aware that the conscious mind is nothing but a construct, assembled as a means of interpreting aggregate data by the deeper functions of the brain1. But those deeper functions do react to the world around us, and influence the conscious mind in ways we don’t consciously recognize in the moment.
In the case of literally anything that indicates there might be something wrong with us, our pattern-matching-and-predicting brain recognizes that if it cannot accurately match and predict patterns, that impairs our chances of survival. We are, after all, talking about the parts of the brain that read everything in terms of primitive, animal response. The parts that are concerned, first, foremost, and only… with surviving. So those parts see any challenge to our ability to survive as a cause for fear.
In almost all cases, unless there is a real threat that the rest of our brain, either conscious or more primal, can verify, this fear gets allayed, minimized, or mitigated. But it’s the source of that gnawing dread that comes from minor incidents. It’s why when you lose something stupid, like nail clippers, you keep working the problem in the back of your mind, you get distracted and keep finding yourself glancing around thinking ‘I always put them right there… where the hell would they be?’ and so on.
We don’t consciously perceive it as fear, but that’s where its roots lie.
It also manifests as anger. It is, in fact, exactly that underlying fear that causes more or less all anger. Anything you’re mad at is a challenge to your expected normal patterns. Anger is your brain’s chemical release telling you to FIX IT!!! In essence, anger is your deeper brain activity deciding ‘The problem can’t be internal, it must be external. I will remove the problem and stop letting it make me afraid!’ It’s the ‘fight’ of ‘fight or flight’: Either remove the problem, or remove yourself from the problem’s proximity.
So, any time you feel aggression? Any time you feel like you need to duel someone, or demean them, insult them, belittle them? There’s an underlying fear there, of some sort.
In the case of xenophobia, the underlying fear is usually that the influence of ‘outsiders’ will make things not conform to the ‘proper’ order of daily life. They’ll say and do things that disrupt the expected patterns. They may even change those patterns over time, forcing you to adapt to their patterns. And that cannot be allowed… after all, if you’re adapting to their patterns, then your patterns… were wrong. You were wrong. You were not anticipating patterns correctly. You might die.
Again, all well below conscious levels.
Edit: Also, for @Branka_Adovic: This is me starting to warm to a topic, and composing a short-but-complete response. It is still not a true ‘text wall’. You’ll notice, you never got this far.
1. The classic ‘clapping at a distance’ experiment is an easy indicator of this. The moment where the sound and light of the person clapping reach your senses at a greater difference than your brain’s ‘blurr’ of reconstructing events, you’re suddenly aware of the separation, and it’s just… weird to experience.
Dayum. I was about to ask 
Didn’t I ask you to stop bothering me with your nonsence before?
Do not answer to my posts and get out from my sight, useless inconvenience.
Pfft.
See?
That’s when you use different words to explain a phenomenon. But when you’re using this two-rooted word, that comes to the situation that the word as a whole becomes opposite to what concept of two words explains, and that’s simply unacceptable.
For us in general a concept of sharp disdain or prejudice of foreigners is absolutely not negative, while the word xenophobia does have indeed negative context because it shows, well, what it says: a phobia.
You can easily can show that phobia is very undesirable, but you can’t show that prejudice and disdain of foreigners is negative that easily, so you make a deliberate attempt at renaming things and making these words that connotate different things to explain a phenomenon you don’t like so others won’t like it as well.
Introduction of such words seems to me like a deliberate attempts of foreigners to get a better treatment than they deserve!
It’s not even Caldari/Napanii or Achura word as far as I know. Where did phobia came to us from? Is it Amarr word? I know for sure that slave came to us from Amarr language because we didn’t even have a concept of that.
Except for the simple fact that disdain and prejudice is inherently negative. It is saying ‘no, do not want’ to them and their ways. Regardless of how it gets framed, that remains true.
Do you have troubles reading or what?
Do I have to repeat it several times to every minmatar?
Stop writing to me.