It doesn’t piss me off, but it is hard to read. I have to stop and figure out what you mean, because I pronounce “cos” different from “cause”. Sort of like the difference between “cot” and “caught.”
As for “he he,” my friend Cathy used to use a chat program that would insert sounds if you typed certain codes. “he he he” would produce a laughing sound. That’s where I’ve always understood it to come from. I still find it annoying, though!
I see “yea” (prinounced “yay”) as being appropriate in things like “Yea, O Lord”; “yeah” (pronounced with the same vowel as in “fat”) in “yeah, right”; and “yah” (pronounced as in “fa la la”) as being a bit slangy. My mother and her German-descended sisters use “Yah” (ja?) a lot; they’ve never spoken a speck of German, so I think it must be hard-wired.
And I’d rather see “cuz” than the abomination " 'cos."
As long as this is still here, allow me to castigate J. D. Salinger for his spelling of the word “crummy” throughout Catcher in the Rye. It took me an extra day to read that book, because I kept stopping to wonder what Holden Caulfield had against crumbly things.
[sub]FTR, he spelled it “crumby”, not “crumbly”. My brain was responsible for adding the extra “l”.[/sub]
