Black, you say? That’s odd. On my screen all you people are Blue, 'cept for the ones I’ve clicked on. Ya’ll are Purple.
Well knock it off, it’s annoying. 
I hope you’re right. If not, fuck this. I mean… that. Her. Whatever.
It’s hard, sometimes, to create a “voice” in writing, and taking on affectations can help define how you want to come across. One of my favorite authors, P.G. Wodehouse, for instance, was a writer that liked these long, tortured, sub-sub-sub claused descriptive sentances with oodles of adverbs and asides. Vonnegut loves these short, kind of jabbing paragraphs periodically puncuated by meaningless phrases (“So it goes.”) And Hemmingway…well, we won’t talk about Hemmingway.
Anyway, I think Celestina is just trying to sound like herself, rather than sounding like the next girl. While I’ll agree that it’s (very) mildly annoying in overuse, I don’t think it’s a real problem in terms of comprehension of her meaning. If it bugs you, just skip her posts.
Stranger
I thought the accent thing was really annoying, but then I read one of Celestina’s posts and liked it so much that I decided I don’t care. I’ve decided that she’s a cool enough person that it doesn’t matter to me.
The technical term for this is an idiotlect.
When I am feeling most informal and at ease with myself, I will sometimes write in dialect. It may be annoying to some, but it is actually common to do that in the South. I recall that during the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Atlanta, there was a moment when a sign of some sort was flashed that said:
Just because writing in dialect might be lame or affected in your part of the country doesn’t mean that it is for Celestina.
I do understand why people tire of it quickly though – except for y’all which is a perfectly good word for informal English.
An insult? Draw thy steel, sirrah. 
Oops, my bad. I should of course have written idiolect, not idiotlect.
It doesn’t annoy me because it’s not proper or because it’s over the top. It annoys me because it sounds phony to me. It clangs.
Maybe it’s not, maybe that’s how Celestina talks, but ummm…well I’m always in favor of the throwing in the vernacular because the vernacular’s interesting. But this just sounds like a cliche. Can anyone tell just what dialect it is?
I think celestina is white, from her pic on one or another of the people pages. Is my memory off?
“Southern vernacular” ?
It’s clearly southern, but it’s not clearly AAVE - while AAVE and general southern English are similar, they’re not identical and this didn’t have that flavor, in my opinion. Have you read Zora Neale Hurston? Most of what she wrote used standard English, actually.
Exactly. All the "I do declare"s, like I said, do not ring true. I have no problem with “y’all” - in fact, I use that word all the time, since it’s useful to maintain a singular-plural distinction in the second person. It’s just the excessive, artificial downhominess that bugs me.
To whit:
None of the grating, excessive dialect that Celestina uses. It shows up in dialect, but not in narration.
Nonsense. The correct way to indicate second-person plural is “yunz.”
Does she post like that all the time, or is it just an occasional post, or part of a post?Because if posting in a “dialect” is just occasional, or just a part of a longer post, then I’d conclude that it’s done for emphasis, and IMHO, that’s okay. (Especially because I do it myself with some frequency.)
If she posts like that all the time, well, I could see how that might be annoying.
I like the way Celestina is writing now. I feel her presence, her humanity, her warmth coming through better than ever. To see her writing in a voice that is comfortable and relaxed for her puts me at ease with her when we share ideas. Strong women like her know how to find their own voice and use it. Don’t like it? Better get used to it. Women from now on are going to have their own voice. Celestina, you go, girl.
I find it distracting and annoying, but not worth pitting. When I was reading the ‘Ask a Muslim Woman’ thread in GD, I couldn’t get more than a quarter through celestina’s posts.
Thanks for the laugh this morning. It’s been a sucky few days, but this was comedy gold.
It’s about as annoying to me as the grapist was, I guess. I really like the fact that this is a place for ‘real’ discussion- no frills enlightenment. No avatars, a paucity of sig lines, etc. Just good talk.
And i say this as someone who’s early posts were certainly less than stylistically correct- but when it was pointed out to me that my lack of capitalizations hindered people’s ability to converse with me, I made an effort to change to meet what I thought were the high standards of these boards.
Of course, my content still generally sucks, but that’s neither here nor there.
Another vote for annoying here. I’m a native Southerner, and I hear it all the time. It doesn’t bother me much to hear it, but it bothers the hell out of me to see it written that way. Is it so much harder to type trying than to type tryin’? It strikes me as artificial and fake, too, I have to say. It seems like a “look at me” type thing, which is okay in the right context, but not in every post everywhere. I’ve been known to use it as a joke, in the right thread, on the right board…but very seldom, and definitely tongue-in-cheek.