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Comment by Pfhreak | Hacker News Reader

Being able to code switch is important for many people. For example, the way I speak to my parents, my friends, the queer community, coworkers, and online are very different.

Language is a ingroup signifier. If you know the lingo, you will be more respected in that community.

You do have to keep up a bit, but maintaining in group status can make a lot of social interactions easier.

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I, for one, would greatly respect a person who always speaks in the same way to everyone.

You would need to see that person communicate in at least two of their communities to begin to respect that person.

Hearing him talking to his boss and to a waiter would be no less informative.

I can imagine if such a person actually treated everyone like they were talking to a 2-year-old, you would actually find it disrespectful.

If I had a bounty program for finding vulnerabilities in my statement, you would've won a prize)

That's a privilege, unfortunately.

It might not be safe for me to drop into queer coded language in a public place, for instance. Or it might not be safe to be publicly out as non-binary somewhere and I can use coded language to signal to others in my community that I'm "on the level", so to speak.

And even then, I think it's pretty safe to say that most folks have a professional and personal tone at the least. (I swear a lot less in the office, for example.)

I wish it was the case that we could all just be who we want to be all the time, but we have different expectations put upon us in different places and times, and adapting our language is one of the ways that we cope with that.

You make a good point, though the next question is what constitutes a community or group, or what kind of community/group is it? Think of it as a continuum where on the one hand you have the fleeting, shallow kind of community (including, I would argue, most groups online) and on the other you have the stable, deep kind (an increasingly endangered species both on- and offline). The more a group tends toward the shallow end, that means by definition that it is about, and membership in it means, not much. So the signifiers we're talking about become all-important. Speak the code and you're in. Speak the wrong code and you're out. Whereas a "deeper" group based on some significant mutual interest (let's say at the extreme, a life-or-death interest) - that group is going to depend less on talking the talk, because everybody is visibly walking the walk. And as a result, they'll accept more of your natural native quirks and things that make you unique.

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