"What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate" This may apply to you, I'm styling this as first person so it doesn't sound like I'm passively attacking anyone, and it applies to me as much as anyone. I'm hoisting this flag to see if anyone else salutes. I seem to attract replies criticizing my sentence structure and my grammar, absent of comment on content. The replies in which my words are carefully removed so the respondent can distort and misrepresent my meaning shift monotony to tedium, but are not upgrades. But why the distortion and misrepresentation? This is what I don't get. Why do some people rage at "Do I have this right?" summations of what is understood, or a request for clarification? What am I to do with "Your second to last sentence is Finnish and it's also wrong" as the only response to my Google-Translate-aided sentence "Share four to six words in your language that sound funny"? I lose readers after twelve words. I am feeling today that I gladly would have traded places with the victims of yesterday's vehicular and firearm rampage, half a mile from where we were running errands. I don't know where to find online resources on how to deal with people who choose to not ask for clarification but instead awkwardly manipulate interpretation. They won't say "I don't understand" or "can you say that a different way" or "would you paraphrase". I also cannot tell if people online are drunk or in a bipolar attack, if they are trolls or just stupid. I know people reading this think 'So what? Ignore them' but I also think they ignore me until their 'emotional pain-body' overpowers their minds, then they think 'oh boy! who can I attack today?' It's especially hurtful when individuals who do this are people I regarded until that point as reasonable and worthy of acquaintance. I conclude that I've wasted much time online, guided by social anxiety and fear of being judged physically. It is bewildering to be pressed for having to guess at someone's comprehension limitations and how to negotiate through someone else's kludgy mind-programming and emotional triggers. Some children of narcissists and alcoholics and abusers may succeed, or develop empath-like powers, but some with low emotional intelligence, or on some point on the autism spectrum that hobbles their facility at understanding people have a lifetime of work to overcome the handicapped attempts at understanding and identifying a discourse level both they and the other are comfortable with. Good luck trying to communicate when nonverbal cues that would otherwise warn you someone is not worth your time, or is a bot, are not present in faceless interpersonal exchanges.