Like a Can Opener in a Worm Factory

[ Warning: this is one of my bugbears, and has been for many years before I met you. Feel free to regard the following as a tedious and ignorable rant. :) ]

I find reading your blog posts and text messages to be a process of word-for-word translation, rather than one of reading. It's a noticeably slow and sometimes quite annoying process, compared to normal reading.

Basically, I think you (or ne1 who abbvs mrclsly onlne) are saving yourself a few seconds when writing something, at the expense of costing every reader a few seconds to decode it. The readers (collectively) lose more time than you save, so it's selfish in that respect.

For example (heh), it took me a second to work out what "f'rexmple" meant - I had to sound it out in my head, instead of just recognising the symbol and absorbing it. That's an order of magnitude slower.

As well as being slower, it also robs the phrases of their meaning sometimes. Translating word-for-word means I don't always get a feel of the meaning of the sentence initially, and have to re-read a few times to pick that up too.

Also (and I do realise this is snobbery on my part), I regard people who can't spell properly online as being unintelligent. The fact that I know this isn't true of you means that I sometimes find it hard to associate things written by you, with you - even when they have your name and/or photo above them. Which is mildly confusing. :)