Politeness: It's overrated

13 February 2007 — dan

For once, I decided to politely ask someone who hotlinked one of my images to please not do that, via a comment on their blog.

They elected to deal with the problem by deleting the comment, and have continued to leech their little bit of bandwidth out of my server for weeks now.

Hence, this (screenshot).

(OK, they're Dutch, but I'm guessing that someone there speaks just a little English, on account of how their blog name is in English, and all.)

I'm sure they'd love to see a lot more comments, all over their site. Bonus points for any of you who comment in Dutch, a language in which most words sound rude anyway.

Posted in Shop talk. 10 Comments »

10 Responses to “Politeness: It's overrated”

  1. will.dutt Says:
    13 February 2007 at 1:31 pm

    nicely done. better than giving them a 404 message ;) tho its a pity you just can't redirect them back to their own site image or even to google.

  2. ludoergosum Says:
    13 February 2007 at 4:14 pm

    I thought I'd translate "Learn common courtesy" into Dutch and post it as a comment. The only problem is since I don't know Dutch I needed to rely on Babelfish to do the translation for me. No problem, I just popped over to the site, typed in "Learn common courtesy", chose "English to Dutch" and hit the translate button which returned "Leer gemeenschappelijke hoffelijkheid."

    I don't think I could even try to pronounce that without swallowing my tongue... Anyway, being the trusting soul I am I... well... I immediately stuck the translation back in and translated it back from Dutch to English. And, of course, it returned...

    "Leathers common courtesy"...

    While I wouldn't mind posting a comment I'd rather not look like a goob doing it so I think I'll pass on the Dutch, thankyouverymuch...

    At this point I naturally became curious about how far it would go and found it didn't repeat until the sixth pass through the translator. For anyone who's curious, here are all the translations in order:

    English: Learn common courtesy
    Dutch: Leer gemeenschappelijke hoffelijkheid
    English: Leathers common courtesy
    Dutch: De gemeenschappelijke hoffelijkheid van het leer
    English: The common courtesy of leathers
    Dutch: De gemeenschappelijke hoffelijkheid van leer
    English: The common courtesy of leathers

    So it went from "Learn common courtesy" to "The common courtesy of leathers." Hmmm... I'll have to see if I can come up with a sentence containing as many words with multiple definitions as possible. If I only knew a language besides English so that I could pick words with many definitions that also have many definitions English. That would really end up seriously tortured...

    Alex

  3. Itsacon Says:
    13 February 2007 at 5:38 pm

    Dutchy to the rescue:

    `Leer gemeenschappelijke hoffelijkheid' is acceptable dutch, though horribly old-fashioned. (`Leer' is the imperative of `leren'. dutch for `to learn'. It's also the dutch word for leather, hence the breaking of the Babelfish)

    A more modern way of saying `learn common courtesy' would be `Leer je fatsoenlijk te gedragen' (literally: `Learn to behave in a decent manner').

    Cheers,
    Itsacon

  4. stevetecza Says:
    14 February 2007 at 1:36 am

    sorry dan i tried a fifty hitler post but it just ignores it. :(

  5. stevetecza Says:
    14 February 2007 at 1:42 am

    also i translated "do not mess with [dan]"
    and it recycled into "do not make a mess with"

    continuing the process gives:
    "do not make make make make a mess with" and so on

  6. RichVR Says:
    14 February 2007 at 2:21 am

    Dictionary.com has a translator that does English to Dutch. I don't know how good it is, though. But I posted something anyway...

  7. Stark Says:
    14 February 2007 at 5:00 am

    Having lived there for 5 years I can promise you that, unless they are over 60, the blog owner speaks and reads english just fine. It happens to be a required course for students (well, at least it was in the late 80's) in the Netherlands. It's funny, you'd ask a shop keeper if he spoke english and he'd invariably say "A little" and then proceed to speak better english than I did and I'm a native speaker. I did try to learn the language - and I could hold a reasonable conversation (about the level of a 12 year old I'd guess) but I could never learn to write it. The spelling is brutal.

  8. Daniel Rutter Says:
    14 February 2007 at 7:33 am

    Aaand... they've deleted the image, and all of your +5 Insightful comments.

    Well, that's just as good as an apology, isn't it?

  10. Slash Says:
    15 February 2007 at 12:29 am

    And now he says you are mad because you dont have money for bandwith :D how cute


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