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but i hate this capture the flag of neurodivergence, competing access needs are a thing, but try being, idk, polite?, it's worth a shot
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There’s nothing wrong with conlangs. I love them, and admire people who create them; they’re perfectly valid as an art form and can be a fun and beautiful way to communicate. There’s nothing wrong with inside jokes or memes; I employ them among my groups of friends, and love the glimpses of humanity I get from hearing about other people’s. Sometimes the confluence of references can be the sweetest, funniest, most concise way of communicating something, and sometimes what you’re communicating is just you’re my people and I love you, and that is beautiful and valid. There’s nothing wrong with neopronouns or any such adapted language; they’re perfectly valid, I use them, whenever asked, and in fact I once assigned some to a character in a work of fiction I wrote solely to give myself practice using them, so it wouldn’t be so strange to me, since the idea was new to me but I had begun to encounter people who used them. And they convey things that could not already be conveyed using existing language, and so their creation is beautiful and necessary– as is their explanation.
The thing all these things have in common is that nobody is assuming you know them. If someone has created a conlang, they’d be excited to give me a glossary, and would not use the language with me if I had not been given an opportunity to know what the words meant.
If I am making a bunch of references to inside jokes, I will make sure that everyone in the conversation has had a chance to hear the background context, so that they are not excluded– if it is not possible, I will apologize to the excluded person, and try to keep my references to a minimum in conversations they’re part of.
If someone has neopronouns, I will happily use them, but I need to be told what they are and how to use them grammatically. Once this is done, I will do my best, just as I do with anything I’m learning, but I don’t think it would be reasonable for me to know to use pronouns if I haven’t been told what they are. This is why people say “she/her”, “they/them”, “xe/xer” and so on, by the way, instead of just saying “she”– it’s to give you what you need to use it!
So tone indicators– fine, use them, but if you’re using them in a conversation with me, understand that they are opaque to me so I will not understand them so you using them is serving absolutely no purpose, and so you will have to also, if indicating your tone is important to the meaning of the conversation, do so using language I can understand, and additionally know that if you have repurposed widely-used existing acronyms or abbreviations, you’re going to have to clear up what you mean, and in fact for the ones whose older and far more common usages are actively offensive, you should avoid using them unless you’re trying to cause offense.
Because this is the main point I’m getting to: It’s really fucking rude to address someone using language they do not know and are excluded from.
So every single time you use a tone indicator with someone whose familiarity with the system you haven’t bothered to verify, you are appending another, secret, tone indicator on the end, which just says HOSTILE, invisibly appended after every other thing you have typed, because you are using abbreviations that in broader culture mean other things, and expecting your reader, without having asked if they know them, to discard everything else they know, and put themselves out to decipher your unfamiliar jargon.
It’s entitled and hostile and counterproductive. So I’m not saying don’t use them, I’m saying ask first, and if the person’s not familiar, then make your meaning clear in standard language. It’s pretty simple. If you love this specific system a lot and talk to this person a lot, maybe drop a link to a key and ask if they’d be willing to learn them. But understand that is a big ask, because there are so many other ways to convey the same exact information that are not reliant upon a brand-new obscure code. (Your picture was not posted)
