If you disabled delivery before folks jibed at me about misreading PhilE’s joke earlier, I was put off by that today, too. It’s hard to remember that each person is teasing independent of the others, and a single tease would have been fine, only that with the group, you get three or four single jokes at your expense instead of the one. Anyway, it put me in a bad mood today.

I’ve tried to adopt a policy of not making a joke at someone’s expense without reading through everything, to make sure I’m not just piling on. If no one made a similar joke, I might make it, if it’s not too stale already.

So I hear the lament, brother. Come on back when it suits.

Like Harry says, a lot of the teasing is meant good-naturedly. It’s just that we’re, as a group, mostly pretty socially inept and not all that good at picking up cues — even when “cues” is defined to mean “repeated explicit requests.” It’s also that when someone “corrects” something one thought was clear, one wonders if maybe one *wasn’t* clear, and it’s easier and more comfortable to make a joke — even at someone else’s expense — than to deal with one’s own discomfort in a more honest way.

For myself, and the rest of us, sorry.