Re: Men vs Women on Conlang

Padraic Brown writes:
 > --- Tim May <butsuri@...> wrote:
 >
 >
 > Note also the high rate of Real Names in use, as
 > opposed to obvious Internet nicknames. I think I
 > would assign a much higher certainty than you
 > would in this matter!
 >

Oh, I'd assign a higher certainty than in other places on the
Internet - just a good deal lower than a lot of the other facts that
make up my world.

As far as the real names go - the names in the headers are provided by
the email clients of the sender, not by their registration with the
list.  Generally speaking we'll see whatever name they normally supply
for that account (there may be mail clients which provide automatic
name alteration by destination address, but I doubt this feature is
much used).  So of course, this does provide extra reason to believe
that people are representing themselves accurately.  But it's not
difficult to set up a webmail account, or another address on an ISP
account, if you want to maintain a secret identity.

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