# How difficult do you find it to comprehend this 'love my manager' OP?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [October 4, 2014, 6:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361 "2014-10-04T06:15:47Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@bldysabba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bldysabba)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 6:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/1 "2014-10-04T06:15:47Z")
Poll forthcoming.
One of our one hit wonders drove by with an OP with idiosyncratic English usage a few days ago.
> [@In love with my manager.... he knows it... and i need tips to move on ??](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-love-with-my-manager-he-knows-it-and-i-need-tips-to-move-on/700173/1):
>
> Hi
> So lately i have been getting butterflys in my tummy when i see my manager or he touches ne in any way…
> I jever had a thing for him in past 2 years and bow suddenly i am head over heels for him… it started out coz f him… he started looking at me … and then he touched and rubbed my back daily by some or the other reason… then he started to check me out from head to toe not in some creepy way …but he had dis intense look in his eyes…which made me skip a beat… den he started noticing change in my behaviour as i became more confused and worried about all dis… i suddenly became more aware of his presence i became quieter and more lost in my thoughts … i tried avoiding him… and den he started hitting ke with his questions what happened to u… y r u so lost… wts bothering u… i replied nothing to all f his questions so he said dats hes hundred percent sure ders something in my mind… and whenevr he asked all dis he gave me a strange look and smile almost as if he was dazed… n dat made my heart beat more faster… this went on for few weeks and then one day he told me to tell him wts wrng odrwise he will take a one to one meet with me… n that day i told him dat ders nthn i cn tell hm coz i myself m confused and i told hm dat all i want is for him to b safe coz a few days back he had an accident and that oeft me way tooo scared… post dat he still looks at me all d tym n he still touches my back which i am in love with now… the way his hand feels is nthn i cn describe but i dont react and now i want to know how can i avoid him n get this feeling out of me… coz afterall hes my manager and i dnt wnt to mess things up… \*\*\*\*hes single and i am single hes jus 5 years elder to me…but still i dnt wnt this coz if it turned out that he dosent loves me i will b damn hurt… so mite as well i avoid him… helppppp :smack:
Not pretty is it? But, IMO, it doesn’t require anything more than a slight extra effort to follow along. Other posters disagree
> [@In love with my manager.... he knows it... and i need tips to move on ??](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-love-with-my-manager-he-knows-it-and-i-need-tips-to-move-on/700173/72):
>
> A message board is a communication environment. If you write something that is virtually incomprehensible to the vast majority of participants (or that takes extraordinary time and effort to comprehend), you have failed to communicate — and no amount of bending over backwards to be politically correct can justify it.
> [@In love with my manager.... he knows it... and i need tips to move on ??](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/in-love-with-my-manager-he-knows-it-and-i-need-tips-to-move-on/700173/74):
>
> This isn’t a multilingual board. The rules state you must post in English and imply that your post must be understandable for the benefit of the mods. The bastardization that is the OP might be considered English by some, but only Barbara Billingsley might have been able to speak it.
> …
>
> This is the Straight Dope, not Lumosity. I have never seen a mess like the one in the OP. I would be very surprised if the vast majority of the people in this thread could understand it with ease and were only mildly puzzled by it. I’m with **DChord**. If you have to bend so far backward to justify it that you can poke your head between your legs from behind, it’s not worth the effort. Political correctness be damned. People should consider their readership and make an effort to be understandable. There are many people from other countries with a less-than-perfect understanding of English, but at least they apply themselves to be comprehensible.
Where do you think the OP’s language stands in the spectrum of comprehensibility? Poll forthcoming
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### Author:  [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 6:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/2 "2014-10-04T06:26:23Z")
Mild puzzlement. Also absolute apathy. Anyone who writes that poorly is of nearly zero interest to me.
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### Author:  [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 6:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/3 "2014-10-04T06:30:10Z")
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?”
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### Author:  [@bldysabba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bldysabba)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 6:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/4 "2014-10-04T06:36:57Z")
> [@Trinopus](#):
>
> Mild puzzlement. Also absolute apathy. Anyone who writes that poorly is of nearly zero interest to me.
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.
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### Author:  [@Stringbean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stringbean)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 7:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/5 "2014-10-04T07:26:12Z")
It’s not incomprehensible or even that absurd.
That someone would literally spell everything out in such a distasteful way is the real story.
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### Author:  [@grude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/grude)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 7:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/6 "2014-10-04T07:32:26Z")
I understood it perfectly, if anything it was pretty comprehensible compared to some absolute jibberish I have seen.
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### Author:  [@Hector\_St\_Clare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hector_St_Clare)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 7:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/7 "2014-10-04T07:55:06Z")
> [@Trinopus](#):
>
> Mild puzzlement. Also absolute apathy. Anyone who writes that poorly is of nearly zero interest to me.
Why?
I understood it perfectly.
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### Author:  [@Lord\_Feldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lord_Feldon)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 8:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/8 "2014-10-04T08:11:55Z")
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.
> [@bldysabba](#):
>
> 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.
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.
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### Author:  [@Maastricht](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maastricht)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 8:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/9 "2014-10-04T08:46:17Z")
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Blake_(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. .
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### Author:  [@elbows](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elbows)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 9:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/10 "2014-10-04T09:55:33Z")
Bad language skills AND purposeful use of lame ‘textspeak’ are a dreadful combination. Pick a struggle!
I didn’t wade past the third sentence.
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### Author:  [@Salem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Salem)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 10:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/11 "2014-10-04T10:45:46Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@Antinor01](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Antinor01)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 11:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/12 "2014-10-04T11:04:11Z")
Readable with some effort. However, I feel it was wasted effort because it’s fucking stupid.
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### Author:  [@Kamino\_Neko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kamino_Neko)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 11:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/13 "2014-10-04T11:07:37Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@Count\_Blucher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Count_Blucher)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 1:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/14 "2014-10-04T13:32:58Z")
> [@elbows](#):
>
> Bad language skills AND purposeful use of lame ‘textspeak’ are a dreadful combination. Pick a struggle!
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_.”
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### Author:  [@Octarine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Octarine)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/15 "2014-10-04T13:39:27Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@Jack\_Batty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jack_Batty)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 1:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/16 "2014-10-04T13:40:09Z")
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.
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### Author:  [@kayT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayT)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 1:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/17 "2014-10-04T13:41:49Z")
I could read it but why would I want to?
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### Author:  [@El\_Kabong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/El_Kabong)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/18 "2014-10-04T14:06:30Z")
Mild puzzlement, with side orders of bemusement and annoyance.
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### Author:  [@seal\_cleaner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/seal_cleaner)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/19 "2014-10-04T14:11:26Z")
The post would get downvoted in reddit, which is often the gold standard of literary opacity.
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### Author:  [@bldysabba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bldysabba)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361/20 "2014-10-04T14:33:18Z")
> [@Octarine](#):
>
> 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).
I think those are probably typos. jever is never but bow is now. And both j and b are right next to n.
[Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-difficult-do-you-find-it-to-comprehend-this-love-my-manager-op/700361.md?page=2)