Mm, to an extent I agree with you there. English basically just happens for me, too. otoh it takes actual effort for me to depunctuate and decapitalize my writing and it makes my writing much slower so i never bother xcept for effect
OTOOH, there is a definite argument that punctuation, capitalization, and whitespace are adaptive - they're there because they make it slightly easier to scan the text quickly. Some people extend that to acronyms too, but I don't think that's valid; like you say, nobody needs to expand ffs, wtf, etc., they just get read as symbols-in-themselves.
I don't agree with the "one proper English" school of thought some of my more tedious teachers used to rant about; it's trivially obvious to me that there are lots of ways to write proper English depending on context, and each one is going to be different than all the others, which are in turn different from each other. (Obviously, they're all much more similar to one another than they are to txtism or the Scientific Style.) And I totally agree with you that most of them actually detract from communication most of the time. So there's no plausible formal reason whatsoever to avoid casual vernaculars.
As far as obscenity goes, I think I'm in precisely the opposite position - I've spent so much time in contexts where it's expected and unmarked that it's actually quite surprising when I don't. Doesn't mean I'm not fond of using it for emphasis on occasion, of course...
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OTOOH, there is a definite argument that punctuation, capitalization, and whitespace are adaptive - they're there because they make it slightly easier to scan the text quickly. Some people extend that to acronyms too, but I don't think that's valid; like you say, nobody needs to expand ffs, wtf, etc., they just get read as symbols-in-themselves.
I don't agree with the "one proper English" school of thought some of my more tedious teachers used to rant about; it's trivially obvious to me that there are lots of ways to write proper English depending on context, and each one is going to be different than all the others, which are in turn different from each other. (Obviously, they're all much more similar to one another than they are to txtism or the Scientific Style.) And I totally agree with you that most of them actually detract from communication most of the time. So there's no plausible formal reason whatsoever to avoid casual vernaculars.
As far as obscenity goes, I think I'm in precisely the opposite position - I've spent so much time in contexts where it's expected and unmarked that it's actually quite surprising when I don't. Doesn't mean I'm not fond of using it for emphasis on occasion, of course...