"That's a foul!"

[bainsey]

Originally Posted by Snaqwells

You know as well as anyone that communication is more than words. Context matters. Tone matters.

There we go. That's lucid.

Context and tone indeed matter. If this sentence came from a coach that I knew well, and it came from a humouous angle, there's no way in hell I'm penalizing that. From a kid I don't know, though? (And I don't know any of them.) I don't see how any context would make this permissible for a kid to talk to an official that way.

Bear in mind, too, that Juggling passed on penalizing this sentence. Often times, passing comes off as condoning, so what happened a bit later? The kid mouthed off again. This is why you have to nip those imperative sentences in the bud.

FWIW, "That's a foul!" very seldom gets a second thought from me. It's a declarative sentence, so it's a statement of opinion (or perceived fact?) that's not directed at anyone. I could see it as the last straw of an ABS T, but that's about it.