I don’t know; I have to side with the folks against “u” and “4.” As has been stated countless times before, the abbreviations ever-so-slightly interrupt my comprehension, enough to annoy me, and I think it’s downright rude to continue posting in this manner, when others have expressed gripes with your habit. Just like writing without initial capitals, all-caps, or without paragraph breaks, you’re making it needlessly more difficult on the reader. And, to me, that shows a great disrespect for your audience.
As for the commonly used acronyms, I have to agree that I did fine them annoying at first. But once I’ve gotten used to them, they don’t slow my reading down at all – I parse them as one syntactical unit, “IMHO” I pronounce as “imho.” “SNAFU” – does anyone still use SNAFU in all caps? It’s gone the way of “radar” and “laser.” “AFAIK” is incredibly useful. “IANAxxx” I can live without.
At any rate, typing “u” for “you” only saves two keystrokes. The other initialisms/acronyms save over a dozen keystrokes, and are flagged in all caps which helps tell the reader what to expect.
I also find the “visual rhythm” of internetese to be very distracting. Sentences like “r u the 1 4 me?” and “i luv u 2” tend to look stupid. Something about the telegraphic of sentences with such short average word lengths doesn’t look right and, well, it looks idiotic. Especially in a forum like this.
Messageboards are a text-based medium. Here, we don’t even have avatars, long sigs or linked images to “enhance” the message, so each poster is really only known for his or her user name and the quality- or lack thereof- of their writing. We are given but one color of paint and one size brush. How you choose to use it is up to you.
Because of the above, this is a case of ‘judging a book by its cover’. We have no means to judge the other person save for how he or she writes. Period, end of conversation. You are judged on nothing but your use of the language and the accepted decorum of the board.
Lacking alternate media (photos, etc) readers will judge you by the quality of your posts. You may well be a Nobel Laureate and hold several doctorates, but if you write/type in a sloppy or slovenly manner, those who read your posts will invariably form a mental image of you as considerably less intelligent than those qualifications might merit.
Here, on this board, using the single letter u in place of the properly descriptive word you, is seen as slovenly, sloppy, and even annoying.
Worse, defending such usage as deliberate, as a “time saving measure”, is essentially seen as rude. Claiming such usage as acceptable, repeatedly, even in the face of concentrated declarations to the contrary, and further claiming that, since other readers can understand it, then they are the “stupid” ones for complaining, is seen as deliberately and maliciously insulting.
Basically, you’re free to type however and whatever you damn well please. However, we are equally free to judge you as an idiot, a moron and an asshole based on those selfsame posts, if you chose to ignore decorum and type in a deliberately sloppy and annoying manner.
Give it up man! This discussion in no longer about the “difficulty” of such substitutions. It has already been mentioned almost 100 times now that yes, such substitutions cause interruptions in the visual word processing flow. No, it isnt “difficult” really, but it does cause many readers (myself included) to stall and try to reinterpret the sentence they thought they were reading.
What is in discussion currently is the fact that such usage is drastically out of place on a message board such as this one. Many posters have stated that seeing such practice makes them instantly think less of the author in question.
That, alone, should be enough for you to stop doing it. Write however you like, I’ll consider you an idiot for a short period of time until I realize you aren’t even worth that. From then on, I will just ignore your posts. So much for the message you we’re trying to get across.
Thank you for the observation; I did notice those in this thread who were too anal. As for the other 44,000 members, I’ll take it on a case by case basis.
Oh, for those of you wondering about DYWYPI?, it stands for “Do you want your possessions identified?”. That appears after you die in a number of roguelike games, such as Nethack and ADOM.
Doc Nickel managed to restate most of my points with no tea-bag references. Kudos!
Someone told me once that, if you ignore them, they go away.
Someone else told me once that, if I didnt like his behavior, I should just ignore it.
It’s a lot quieter in here since I took that advice.
Childish - ha. I’m just doing what you requested of me, Civil Defense. I had hoped that was the obvious meaning in my “childish” response, but I guess not.
Honey, I’ve been here a lot longer than you have. Believe it when I tell you that the people that posted on this thread are very likely representing the active whole of this board pretty accurately. Meaning, a few won’t mind, but many will. A high majority will deem you to be an idiot—a lazy idiot—if you keep up with this.
That’s simply the way it is. I don’t doubt that you probably aren’t stupid. However, you can’t “explain away” your willful behavior. We’ve told you that it’s not looked upon kindly here, and yet you somehow delude yourself that you can have it all your way—that you can write in a way that you’ve been told is looked upon as moronic, and yet somehow, you won’t be looked on as moronic.
You’ve already been told this multiple times already. It simply does not work that way.
You’re suggesting that if I choose to use “u” in the future at some random time, that I’m going to get the majority of the posters in a thread to turn and begin attacking me for doing so, regardless of my actual post content – which has then, of course, been deemed to be the ramblings of an idiot?
Actually, I’ll go ahead and suggest that I may have just put words in your mouth. Rather, if I’m reading you right, you’re suggesting that no matter the form of the rest of my post, the content, or the attitude in which it is conveyed, the majority of the readers are going to immediately deem it ignorant upon seeing a “u”?
Who said anything about attacking? They’ll deem you an idiot. That doesn’t mean that they tell you you’re an idiot. Some may, some may not.
You can’t control other people’s thoughts. You can’t insist that they not decide that you’re a moron. You many never know that they think you’re a moron. But that may very well be what they’ll be thinking.
As a matter of fact, a whole lot of people are already getting that impression from you right now. Oops! Too late!
