Calm down? In the Pit? What for?
To spare the sensibilities of self-absorbed arrogant assholes such as yourself who would prefer to impose their lazy disregard of standard orthography on other posters without incurring any criticism for it?
Not a chance, crybaby.
I know that it’s lots of fun to claim our sensibilities are extraordinarily delicate, but this is hilarious.
Thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed it.
“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.”
instead of “former” and “latter” which only elitist new world order ivy league snobs use , why not just type “BALLET is an expression…” and “JAYWALKING is merely a self-centered…”
talk about self-centered
The youth of today are writing more than any generation preceding it - and they are doing so with great perception of their audience. The internet, text messaging, and blogs are all casual mediums and don’t require as many formalities.
Older generations were taught to use very strict formalities in their writing because often the only time they would actually write a letter would be in a professional or buisness setting. “Casual” written correspondence didn’t even exist. Even a rare written letter to a friend was semi-formal.
I think it is incredible that the youth have appropriated an entire medium and invented a new dialect - one built around efficiency, creativity, and comfort. In no way has it diminished the language nor is it a reflection of their general intelligence.
i actually do enjoy reading what you write
you ARE entertaining, and i am easily entertained
Look, not using caps is something you got from chatrooms, messengers and online video games. Mediums where you talk one sentence at a time, rather than in paragraphs, and it’s completely natural to omit caps. I do it too. Some people insist on using caps in chatrooms, and those people are almost universally pretentious idiots.
But a message board isn’t like a chatroom. It’s not about formalities, or enforcing pointless archaic rules. No one will jump on you for ending a sentence in a preposition, or whatever. When you write posts that contain multiple sentences and even paragraphs, starting new sentences with a capital letter becomes important for readability. As jtgoddess’s link somewhat inadvertantly points out, due to the way the brain reads text, it doesn’t even matter if the actual letters are scrambled. As long as the structure remains intact your brain will translate for you on autopilot. But capital letters are part of the structure and without them your posts have to be read in “manual” mode. Kind of like deciphering (a very easy) code.
So reading your posts takes the average person a lot more effort, and that’s just disrespectful to your audience.
Huh. Personally I’d be much less embarrassed by a disability than a character flaw. I’d also be much more willing to indulge it. For instance, if someone is arthritic and genuinely has a hard time typing, I’m good with that. But if someone is just too lazy to write properly, why on earth should I invest the effort to read their droppings?
Generally, if you’re trying to convey an idea, you want to make it easy for your audience to understand you. If you can’t be bothered, then I’m going to assume that you’re talking just to hear yourself.
What do you mean, “casual” written correspondence didn’t even exist? Those of us who can remember all the way back to thirteen-cent first-class postage stamps definitely used “casual” writing in much of our communication, such as scribbling notes on the whiteboard on a friend’s door in a college dorm, leaving a note for a roommate, and many other contexts.
Sure, the beef here is not about kids talking to each other in a mutually intelligible youth dialect that they enjoy and older people find difficult to understand. That’s hardly a new or “incredible” phenomenon; the only new thing about this generation’s version of it is that they’ve applied it primarily to written rather than spoken language, due to the dominance of electronic text media.
The beef here is about kids (or anybody else) participating in a medium where the primary dialect is standard written English and declaring that they’re not even going to bother trying to follow its orthographic conventions. If people are going to insist on writing kidspeak in a forum where a more formal written dialect is the accepted norm, they shouldn’t whine about getting flamed for it.
diane email me and i will wire 100 grand into your bank account
thank god she will not invest the effort to read this dropping
There was nothing inadvertent in that. Brains are flexible. Really really flexible.
I don’t for one minute believe that anyone here has a problem reading text that lacks capitalization. A wall of text? Yeah, that can be a problem, especially on a screen–capitals or no capitals.
Most of the rules being quoted have much less to do with comprehension and readability than they do with hierarchy and status. We want people to write the “right way” so that they can be like us, and we decide that X or Y is the “wrong way” and we sneer and feel very superior.
:rolleyes: Oh no, of course not. That’s exactly why corporate and academic researchers on speech processing put so much time and effort into developing and publishing algorithms for automated capitalization and punctuation of machine-transcribed speech, because it doesn’t matter a bit to the reader whether text includes capitalization or not:
If you’re calling your posts ‘droppings’, maybe you should reassess things. Sure they lack capitalization, but they’re not so badly formed as to constitute scat.
I notice that none of you have answered why you can’t just skim past posts that don’t capitalize or punctuate the way you’d like.
I’ll buy the first round. 
You’ve got a stick *so far up your ass *that it’s actually destroyed the humor centor of your brain. My cite is the fact that even the OP of the thread thought it was funny.
Oh my. Apparently I do have to quote the entire chain of posts. Here’s the particular thread of conversation being discussed:
Nowhere in there do I see you say, “Oh, thank you koufax, I did use the wrong form of the verb.” Certainly not in between post 83 (where you mock him because the question went over your head) and post 88 (where I first made fun of you for it).
It’s actually bullshit. There was no study that proved that. And it doesn’t even work in all cases.
Of course we can. And we can also foregather in the Pit and complain about them. Why can’t you militant anti-prescriptivists just skim past threads like this that criticize the laziness and arrogance of people who refuse to try to follow standard conventions of written language even in settings where those conventions are normally used?
Oh, that’s right, because you can’t resist the temptation to come in and “poke people with sticks”. In other words, you’re a troll.
Indeed, dhkendall was admirably gracious to you about your stick-poking “gotcha” games. This being the Pit, though, where we don’t have to suffer fools gladly for the sake of maintaining graciousness, I see no need to cut you that much slack.
that was the FIRST time you made the error
he was referring to the SECOND time
but, in your defense, you did capitalize
I didn’t say you **can’t **criticize people for not following the rules you’d like them to follow. I’m just making it clear that if you’re going to decry others’ failure to adhere to your standards, you’d better proof your posts before you submit them–or be prepared to get made fun of.
Have your cake and eat it, too, etc. etc.
Trolling still doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Tsk tsk, you made the same mistake twice? With the same word, even? One would think you’d be more careful not to make the same error after having been corrected on it the first time. Unless, of course, you’re just a lazy moron who can’t be bothered to ensure his own posts are grammatically correct so as not to cause any comprehensibility problems for his readers.
I’ve acknowledged that my abilities are not up to my intentions. But thanks for catching that again.
Or it may be that that is an area that causes me problems. Nevertheless, the main point obtains. I am at least making an effort.
In the Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS) forum, blinkie has a great topic Ask the guy with Locked In Syndrome.
The only way this user can “type” is by blinking when he sees the correct letter or word appear on his screen.
He capitalizes words and posts in correct English. If anyone deserves a pass on capitalization, it’s blinkie.
Unless you are also limited to typing in this way, you get no pass.