I recognize that it has rather extended provenance, and i realize that i’ve lost the battle, but you’ll never convince me it sounds anything but uneducated.
i helped my brother jack off a horse
i helped my brother jack off of a horse
So to save yourself the keystrokes to type two commas and a capital I, you instead type two extra letters and a space…?
yes, i just timed it and i save .00000009 of a second doing it my way
so it is ok with you to leave entire words (“of”) out of sentences which makes the sentence harder to understand, but not capitalizing makes you crazy?
then why not just type:
“Just helped brother Jack off horse.”
at least when i don’t capitalize i make sure all the words are there so that the reader can understand what i am trying to say
There’s no word missing from the sentence “I helped my brother, Jack, off a horse.”
I thanked him for pointing out my error. I don’t know how I could have made it more clear.
You really are a dumbass, aren’t you?
Then don’t fucking read them, you shit for brains troll.
It was irony. And not how the kids these days mean it.
of course there is , because the way you just wrote it, your meaning is that you just helped your brother murder a horse
You must have mistaken me for someone else, I have no real interest in nitpicking the finer points of grammar. I’m not very good at it anyway. I was asking what your real reason is for refusing to use capital letters. Because we both know it can’t be laziness.
Edit: And that second last period should have been a comma 
No. It’s possible to interpret the sentence “I helped my brother, Jack, off a horse.” in the way that you did (taking “off” as a verb, in the slangy sense of “murder”), but the rules of grammatical written English don’t require you to do so.
This is because verbs like “to help” can in some cases correctly be followed only by an adverbial phrase with no intervening verb, as in the following examples:
“I helped my mother out of her chair” is equivalent to “I helped my mother get up out of her chair”.
“The director helped the stumbling actress off the stage” is equivalent to “The director helped the stumbling actress walk off the stage”.
Although using the phrase “off of” to mean “off” is no longer considered an outright error in most American English usage, it certainly isn’t mandatory, as you seem to be trying to assert. There is nothing incorrect about using “I helped my brother off a horse” to mean “I helped my brother dismount from a horse”.
Reasonable people can disagree on the finer details of how to apply the rules of standard orthography involving things like spelling, capitalization and punctuation. And of course, everybody makes inadvertent errors in orthography from time to time. It’s only stupid and/or lazy and/or arrogant people who use such disagreements and errors as their excuse to simply ignore rules of standard orthography altogether, and then resent being criticized for it.
I would be embarrassed to claim that I couldn’t comprehend a sentence because it lacked capitalization. That, to me, would show a remarkable lack of reading ability.
http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/OpticalIllusions/jumbledWords/jumbledWords.html
I would accept the claim from someone new to reading. But from those who claim to be reasonably educated and who have been exposed to a lot of text? No.
No one is saying it’s impossible to comprehend. We’re saying it’s harder to read than a properly formatted sentence. Also, the problem is mostly paragraph, not individual sentences. I have no issue with lack of capitalization in chatrooms, for example.
Things written above a 3rd grade reading level are harder to read than Dick and Jane. Brains are flexible, if you allow them to be.
I’m somewhat guilty of this. I try not to do it excessively (and I hope I’m not the one you’re talking about :)), but you could probably look through my past posts and find at least one ellipsis in each one.
This thread is very meta, though. I’m loving it.
As embarrassed as you’d be to claim that you’re too lazy to use the shift key? Really?
The one problem that I have is that the number keys are two far away when I try two onethreethreeseven speak. I used two be able two use numbers for letters, but now I’m two exhausted by the stretch from the home row. Maybe if I eight better, or had less six, I wouldn’t be so exhausted.
tah tah four now
Attack
Sure, but people who demand that you flex your brain to adapt to their own personal orthographic conventions because they’re too lazy to use the standard conventions are not writing at a “higher level”. They’re merely being arrogant assholes.
Some people are permitted to be harder to read but others aren’t? Why is that?
One is admitting laziness. The other is claiming actual cognitive impairment and a sort of mental rigidity that’s much more embarrassing than mere laziness.
So yeah.
Because making something harder to read by giving it more complex content is significantly different from making something harder to read by deliberately abandoning standard conventions for its formatting.
It’s kind of like the difference between ballet and jaywalking. The former is an expression of skill within the recognized rules of a complex genre. The latter is merely a self-centered unilateral decision to abandon recognized rules of traffic for one’s own convenience, even if it causes inconvenience to others.
mom SOMETIMES uses a wheelchair for arthritis but is not permanently confined to the chair. if you help her with something (her cleaning or cooking for example) when she is not in the chair, you are NOT helping her get up and out of the chair.
a director in the old west is helping an alcoholic actress who is arriving from the big city to star in his play off of the stagecoach, he is not helping her walk off the stage.
you remind me of barney fife. always wearing a tie, always wearing a hat, always wearing his shiny holster with his perfectly cleaned gun (no bullets of course) making sure nobody jaywalks on main street even though traffic is always very light and there is only one traffic light. he constantly scolds andy that things are way too lax and the criminals are about to take over mayberry.
this is a message board, barn…calm down