There might be a bit of levity in there, but the name was arrogated by the very people it described. GI3's penchant for the cyber smack down was emulated by every stroke with enough nerve to do so. It's why DIR got such a bad name so quickly. Divers claiming to be DIR, who were clearly otherwise (strokes) did their level best to be as bombastic as their new found hero: George "Trey" Irvine III. They did it to prove to everyone, but mostly themselves, that they were worthy of being DIR. Their strokiness took on a new dimension and they made the internet a decidedly unfriendly place. It's why we don't allow calling people strokes here.
You know, we should alter this poster, if only subtlety:
Trouble diving. Trouble posting. Trouble understanding. Week kick.
Very good perspective!!!!!
I would still stress the word has been used improperly --essentially malapropped ....
Norm Crosby was the father of the Malaprop( a form of comedy), taken from a story about Mrs Malaprop.....
My wife Sandra is constantly malapropping herself..... One example was when she referred to a guy we knew to be a pathological liar, as a barbituate liar...... she has called one of her friends that tends to need huge amount of weight to get neutral, flotacious..... the point is, while it can be funny, you can't actually let people think that this guy who was the liar was in fact a barbituate addict, if that was the effect of the malaprop.....
We should not allow the constant mis-use of a word, to define how the word ought to be used.
Scubaboard is not a cave or tech diving community..not for the masses of it. Any use of the word stroke, in the non-cave 99.9 percent of SB population, will not mean anything more than humor, and it should not actually suggest any chance of death will be visited on those around this target of the word use.
I think I did use the word in the one "Every man for himself thread" almost a year ago, and one other time, I used it with humor for our favorite contrarian on the basic forum, a week ago or so....Neither is representative of the way I post, and the only time I used it
without humor, it was a useful descriptor in my mind, and many others at the time.....which would later come out as
mis-applied, due to the behavior being horribly mis-charicterized by the famous author, and where, had it been accurately explained, my having any thought of using the Stroke word, would not have occurred.