Poll forthcoming.
One of our one hit wonders drove by with an OP with idiosyncratic English usage a few days ago.
Not pretty is it? But, IMO, it doesn’t require anything more than a slight extra effort to follow along. Other posters disagree
Where do you think the OP’s language stands in the spectrum of comprehensibility? Poll forthcoming
Mild puzzlement. Also absolute apathy. Anyone who writes that poorly is of nearly zero interest to me.
Extreme effort. It makes want to take it to the quarry and throw it in. To paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, “English! Do you speak it?”
Sure. I wandered into that thread because of a reference to India, and don’t care a whit about the OP. I just don’t think the language in the post is anywhere near as difficult to understand as it is being made out to be. For the most part, it uses complete English words, put together within reasonable bounds of grammatical tolerance and with some typos and texting contractions thrown in. The phrase ‘virtually incomprehensible’ would never have occurred to me in conjunction with the post, had it not been forcefully presented by one poster and then backed up by another.
It’s not incomprehensible or even that absurd.
That someone would literally spell everything out in such a distasteful way is the real story.
I understood it perfectly, if anything it was pretty comprehensible compared to some absolute jibberish I have seen.
Why?
I understood it perfectly.
Once I glued my eyes to it and forced myself to read it, I was able to extract the meaning, but it took extra effort. People read words (or even short phrases), so text that uses a lot of non-words (whether simple typos like “jever” or “bow” or horrendously butchered things like “odrwise” and “wts”) is more difficult to read. The almost complete lack of capital letters just makes it worse. There were a few things that took me extra time, like “wts,” which I thought was an initialism until I sounded it out like a kindergartner learning to read.
But without extra prompting, I would have just dismissed it as gibberish and went on.
Words are what people read, so their comprising a mere majority of a text is not really satisfactory. There are so many things other than words in that paragraph that it really is difficult to read normally. It’s fine to use “y r u” or maybe even “wts” in a one-sentence text message (I’m not sure I can compromise on “odrwise”). But once you get to the paragraph level, it needs to be written to read, not to sound out.
Not only was it comprehensible, but it woke the eager linguist in me. Normal text just lets me focus on the content, but here the form was (by default) more interesting.
So, channeling dr Spencer Reid and dr Blake from Criminal Minds.
Short sentences. Subject is either typing on a phone with a small screen, or subject is not intelligent enough to make longer structured sentences. The practiced use of the ellips (…) instead of a regular period at the end of the sentence, suggests the latter. Studies show people who use ellpses … instead of a period to string sentences together, are vague airheads.
Moving on. Subject uses a lot of contemporary texting slang. That puts her age under thirty.
Is English her first langueage? That isn’t immediately clear. Again, she uses popular slang, but that could have been picked up from TV. Clearly, she comes from a country with a lot of English spoken on TV (I’m cheating here. Any country has a lot of English-language TV).
Etcetera. .
Bad language skills AND purposeful use of lame ‘textspeak’ are a dreadful combination. Pick a struggle!
I didn’t wade past the third sentence.
It was understandable, but more difficult to read in the sense that if you are not used to “textspeak” you have to decode it as you go along. The sentence structure itself is generally fine and doesn’t seem to be from a non-English speaker. It’s seems like a “lazy” writer- a young kid who is used to texting from a phone as the main way of communicating.
If you break it down and add in correct punctuation and correct a few of the (likely intentional) misspellings, it is really not written poorly.
It’s likely a younger person, as I said, OR it’s simply someone writing this way and type of OP to get a rise out of people. I would lay my bets on the latter.
Readable with some effort. However, I feel it was wasted effort because it’s fucking stupid.
Difficulty in comprehending - minimal.
Difficulty in plowing through - extreme.
It’s the tl;dr that made it hard to read, not any issue in understanding it.
I was thinking “waitress who can’t write, but trying to write to a Message Board” vs “Lame wannabe writer, trying to see if they can showcase skills that they don’t have on how to pretend to write like a waitress who can’t write”. Pick a struggle.
My best answer to the OP: The bad writer whose epic fail at pretending to be a waitress who can’t write well was difficult to read/endure.
If only there was some teacher or professor who could slap a big, red, 24 point font “F” on it and red ink in underneath it, “Look… if you really want to be a writer, you’re going to have to do a Whole Lot Better than this.
Step up your game or be a lot nicer to your waitresses at Chili’s, because you’ll be working with them soon enough.”
It’s fairly easy - the lack of paragraphs is the hardest thing. For some reason she changes out the first letter in a couple of words, but context makes in understandable (“jever” means “never,” “bow” translates to “pow,” etc). There’s also some text speak with “y r u” and “f,” which could be difficult for some.
Extreme effort. Sure, I probably could suss it out, but after the second double-period, or 2/3-ellipsis, or whatever that is, I gave up.
I could read it but why would I want to?
Mild puzzlement, with side orders of bemusement and annoyance.
The post would get downvoted in reddit, which is often the gold standard of literary opacity.
I think those are probably typos. jever is never but bow is now. And both j and b are right next to n.