I had a high school literature teacher that asked me what I thought about the assigned reading, and then told I was wrong. After arguing that the question was not "what did it mean" vs what I thought. I think think whatever the hell I want to think. This was pretty much the death knell of my desire to participate in literature, and freed me up to spend my time in math/sciences. yes, it was just an excuse for something I was going to do anyways, but still a total lack of bedside manner from a teacher can have devastating results.
I always had this issue with assigned reading. I got much worse results when I actually read the book compared to reading just summaries and conclusions on the Internet. If I read myself I came to wrong or irrelevant conclusions and ideas.
Hi Dylan, in this case, Justin probably wasn't worth the time spent to correct here. Everyone else in the world knows the phrase "bedside manner" and knows you weren't talking about what they thought you were talking about. After an attempt or two, it was probably more worth it to move on, whereas here you made probably half a dozen attempts to reconcile with Justin to no avail, leading you to feel frustrated, which caused you to reduce yourself a bit in this conversation, in my opinion. Have a nice week!
To be clear, I'm referring to your pattern displayed in this thread of aggressively taking words outside of context, and not doing a bare minimum effort to try to find reasonable context for them. In this case, it was probably not worth anybody's effort to explain the words to you; this is true. The fact that you're taking it personally as an attack is on you though, not me. Because I don't intend for it to be an attack, I'm simply stating that a lot of unnecessary time was wasted, and unkind words were slung for no good reason. None of it was worth it, because the value you've gotten from now understanding the phrase was not worth the amount of time it took to teach it to you. It's not even just because you weren't very receptive to the information, truth be told, we were maybe also poor teachers here. But I'll give you more information for your time:
A common theme among many English idioms is that a phrase is found in one discipline (ie. the medical discipline), in this case "bedside manner." Some deeper meaning is extrapolated, in this case it is "showing kind, friendly, and understanding behavior for people in your care." And then the phrase is re-used in other disciplines and contexts where the deeper meaning is what is intended to get across to the recipient hearing that phrase, rather than the literal interpretation (ie. the bed isn't necessarily involved at all.)
As another example: "curiosity killed the cat." There's no cat, and it's not necessary that people will die when this phrase is used. It just means "sometimes following your curiosity leads to bad consequences." Hopefully this lesson has helped you the next time you come across an idiom and wonder why they used that choice of words.
Hi Justin, the phrase "bedside manner" is very common, and was taken out of its original context for all kinds of uses because of medical drama TV shows. It basically means, "general human politeness for people you're caring for that are currently not in a confident position." This can apply to a medical professional that takes care of their patients, or a teacher watching over their students, or the person at Best Buy's Geek Squad explaining why your computer doesn't work. Rather than continuing to rile up the other user for no really good reason, perhaps you can accept that your lack of knowledge regarding common English idioms frustrated that other user, and forgive them for being mean to you. In the future, rather than make pedo jokes, maybe you'll give the phrase a look on Google to see if its been used before, because it likely has. Thank you for your time.
Thanks for taking time to explain things from your point of view.
I've seen the phrase used with medical professionals before.
Never with teachers or other situations though. The results and definition from the duckduckgo search (above) also only show it in use by medical professionals, not with others, and doesn't support your stated meaning.
Sounds like the phrase is used more widely in your part of the world. Good for you I guess. :)
Here's a tip: if you encounter this behavior in real life or online again you could simply not respond. It cancels the whole negative chain of communication.
You can just read literature. Academic literary analysis has always been a grift imo. Just completely useless nonsense. Doesn't mean that literature isn't enjoyable.
I recently read a book that would count as literary fiction (as opposed to genre fiction) for the first time in over a decade and I enjoyed it quite a lot.
Explain that to all of those suffering through the reading just to make a grade because it is part of the required list. If I read Scarlet Letter today, I would not enjoy it any more than I did then. I'm just not entertained by some love triangle in a religious uptight society. I get enough of that in my every day life, minus the love triangle. It's the same reason I don't want to watch Rosanne or King of the Hill--it's just too close to home
The book I read was Revelations by Erik Hoel. It was a mystery novel about consciousness researchers. But Hoel is a literature nerd as well and so wrote it in that style. Would perhaps come off as pretentious if not for the good execution.
