taykair
Member
- Messages
- 363
When I first went online, soon after the dinosaurs roamed the digital plain, I was almost immediately confronted by folks saying LOL to me all the time. I assumed it stood for "lots of love", and I couldn't understand why all these strangers were being so chummy with me.
I didn't catch on to ROFL all that quickly either. Using abbreviations to communicate isn't really my kind of thing. I like complete sentences. When someone in a chatroom wrote, "I'm AFK - BRB", I asked him, "What's an AFK? What's a BRB?"
Of course, he wasn't there to answer me.
It's a generational thing, I suppose. Younger folks catch onto these things rather quickly. And there are some old farts who are, no doubt, smarter than me, who can keep up. But not me. No. I still hunt-and-peck my way through complete sentences - sometimes overly-complicated sentences involving lots of punctuation (with the occasional aside which is contained within parentheses) which tend to confuse younger readers as much as their abbreviated postings befuddle me.
Someone once chided me on my overuse - and misuse - of punctuation. I responded by writing:
"I, can't, help, it, if, I, like, commas."
The one kind of punctuation (if it can be called that) which I can't bring myself to use are those damned smileys. I not only find the use of them to be a form of lazy writing, but also a very deceptive form of writing at times. I've known quite a number of folks who will post the most vile and abusive attacks and, at the end of their diatribe, add a few smiley faces. When they are called to account for the harmful things they wrote, they simply respond, "It was obvious that I was being sarcastic. Didn't you notice the smiley face at the end?"
Yeah. I noticed the smiley. However, placing a cherry on top of a bowl of manure doesn't magically transform its contents into ice cream. If you have enough writing skill to use 700 words to describe how much you supposedly hate someone or something, then you ought to have enough skill to use context and content to make it plain that you were being sarcastic. A smiley just doesn't cut it.
I won't say that I've never used LOL instead of expending the colossal amount of energy needed to type the words "that's very amusing" or that I've never used a smiley to convey a warm thought on occasion. Most of those times, however, have been in chatrooms - not on forums or blogs. Chat, many times, requires velocity rather than verbosity. You have to get your thoughts in rather quickly, otherwise (especially for folks like me who hunt-and-peck rather than touch-type) the conversation tends to leave you behind.
Sometimes I wish that smileys had never been invented. They just make me so... so...
I didn't catch on to ROFL all that quickly either. Using abbreviations to communicate isn't really my kind of thing. I like complete sentences. When someone in a chatroom wrote, "I'm AFK - BRB", I asked him, "What's an AFK? What's a BRB?"
Of course, he wasn't there to answer me.
It's a generational thing, I suppose. Younger folks catch onto these things rather quickly. And there are some old farts who are, no doubt, smarter than me, who can keep up. But not me. No. I still hunt-and-peck my way through complete sentences - sometimes overly-complicated sentences involving lots of punctuation (with the occasional aside which is contained within parentheses) which tend to confuse younger readers as much as their abbreviated postings befuddle me.
Someone once chided me on my overuse - and misuse - of punctuation. I responded by writing:
"I, can't, help, it, if, I, like, commas."
The one kind of punctuation (if it can be called that) which I can't bring myself to use are those damned smileys. I not only find the use of them to be a form of lazy writing, but also a very deceptive form of writing at times. I've known quite a number of folks who will post the most vile and abusive attacks and, at the end of their diatribe, add a few smiley faces. When they are called to account for the harmful things they wrote, they simply respond, "It was obvious that I was being sarcastic. Didn't you notice the smiley face at the end?"
Yeah. I noticed the smiley. However, placing a cherry on top of a bowl of manure doesn't magically transform its contents into ice cream. If you have enough writing skill to use 700 words to describe how much you supposedly hate someone or something, then you ought to have enough skill to use context and content to make it plain that you were being sarcastic. A smiley just doesn't cut it.
I won't say that I've never used LOL instead of expending the colossal amount of energy needed to type the words "that's very amusing" or that I've never used a smiley to convey a warm thought on occasion. Most of those times, however, have been in chatrooms - not on forums or blogs. Chat, many times, requires velocity rather than verbosity. You have to get your thoughts in rather quickly, otherwise (especially for folks like me who hunt-and-peck rather than touch-type) the conversation tends to leave you behind.
Sometimes I wish that smileys had never been invented. They just make me so... so...
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