I saw this post from
@Dave Merrill...
...and it made me go, "hmmmm."
This is one of those situations where seemingly-strong language can be ambiguous.
Let's say we have a friend who says "this whole thing is bullsh1t"; but he goes on to tell us that he's "still being at least somewhat careful."
If he lives and works 100 miles from the closest known active case,
and his definition of "bullsh1t" is "a lot of people are panicking and buying crap they don't need, and the media is delivering more sensationalism and fear than useful information,"
and if his definition of "at least somewhat careful" is, "handwashing, keeping 10-ft distance from everyone who isn't a member of my household, working from home, and only going out for groceries,"
...then I'm relatively content with his analysis.
On the other hand, if he lives and works in Seattle,
and his definition of "bullsh1t" is "this won't cause any more problems than the flu does,"
and his definition of "at least somewhat careful" is, "I go to work, I pick my nose, and then I stop by my asthmatic grandma's house to watch Jeopardy with her, but I always wash my hands before dinner,"
...then, yeah, I'd be scared for that guy, and his grandma, and kinda pissed at him.
Dave, I'm not ragging on your post. (I don't know your friend and I don't know where he lives or what he meant.)
But some people I know verbally downplay the COVID outbreak. And when I
press them on what they
really mean, turns out half-the-time they're being just as careful as I am...but are expressing skepticism about
news coverage, or about the
decisions made by state or federal leaders, or even merely trying to counter-balance what they perceive as someone else's excessive panic.
It's amazing how communicative style can cause misunderstandings. For me, the classic example was profanity. I grew up in a mostly non-swearing family, with mostly non-swearing friends. First time I got to know a guy (now a dear friend) who grew up in Connecticut among a family of free-form profanity-artists, I thought he was an out-of-control rage-monster. It took me a while to get used to the fact that he dropped f-bombs casually in the middle of every other sentence. Where I grew up, if someone sounded like that, he was probably a violent drunk and if he was within 20 feet of you, you should probably be getting ready to fight for your life. But for my friend, "profanity in your speech is just like salt-n-pepper on your steak." (I used to have instinctive adrenaline-surges whenever he opened his mouth! But he started having kids, and started cutting back on the profanity, so that helped.)
I'm betting there'll be similar style-confusions in how we all react to COVID-19. So I'm going to try to habitually ask, "Hmm. What do you mean by that?" when I hear the short-form of everyone's opinion, and not judge until I've heard the long-form follow-up.