Linguistic Mission Statement, or why i talk nonsense in the way i do

[sashagoblin]

Someone wrote this to me earlier: Actually, it’s kinda funny. I’m not an ‘English bod’ as it were, but I can’t stand abbreviations and acronyms, yet you being someone that essentially breathes the language, has no problem with them. Knowledge is power perhaps?


...and my answer turned into a bit of a mission statement. So i thought i'd inflict it on the world, especially that part of it on here who have to put up with my relentless acronymage!:

Language fascinates me, all the different things you can do with it, and becuse i can use correct academic English to a high level and get the opportunity to do so on a daily basis, i'm not interested in bringing it into everyday interactions where it isn't necessarily relevant or the most communicative option.

Because 'correct' English holds no terror or even particular interest for me, using it is like breathing, i love vernaculars and the sub-cultures that create them, and the strange argots that grow up around certain areas of expertise/activity/interest. i love catchphrases and the kind of shared linguistic reference points that establish intimacy. And i'm lazy - a lot of what i do is about cramming as much sophisticated meaning as possible into as few words as possible, and so when there's a phrase that comes up a lot (WWD; ateotd; iirc; ftr; ffr; offs, etc) it seems completely logical to use the acronym everybody will understand and plough on regardless, as well as making the sentence llook more interesting, less pretentious, etc. And i don't need to use my own understanding of correct English to differentiate my  intelligence/understanding from that of those surrounding me, because the vast majority of my friends are just as, if not more, intelligent than i am, and justas articulate in their own ways. (Maybe i do tend to be one of the most emotionally  self-aware/articulate, but that's about perception,not linguistic ability!) . So to get hung upon 'correctness' whose functionality is dubious when there might be superior methods of expressing precisely the same thing in vernacular or informal English would necessitate a pretension and an insecurity i really don't have. Not about my linguistic ability, anyway. :oP

 (Minor digression: And incidentally, there are some things you can only do with obscenity: English doesn't have another word as flexible as 'fuck', f'rexmple, or 'cunt'. You eiher have to use multiples - 'have sex with'? - or specify certain actions/parts - 'penetrate', vagina, clit etc - or go all coy - 'inside' - or use something like 'shag' which means different things in different english-speaking areas of the world. Only 'fuck' is universally recognised. Plus such words take added power from their supposedly taboo nature, despite being someof our most commonly-used words. Especially if you look like this tiny well-brought-up middleclass girl ad open your mouth and all this filth spills out. Anyway. End of digression.)

 So  short answer: yep. Knowledge - or rather fluency and its recognition - is power. :oP Maybe?

Comments

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

[ 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. :)

[sashagoblin.livejournal.com]

i think the thing is that I can write in perect English *anytime*. Using language in that way is a mark of being 'at work'. Vernacular in the sense i use it online in informal situation is - as perdrix states below -a mark both of intimacy and of being relaxed, informal, more openly myself. I use language to differentiate, demarcate and signify spaces, particularly safe spaces, in this case for the expression of various elements of myself I'm desperately insecure about in real life.

'F'rexample' isa good example, actually - it's a construction i use because it reflects how i say the phrase. It's phonetic. It hadn't occurred to me that it wuld be difficult to decipher (which is a failure on my part,i'm sorry, i thought it'd be obvious) because as the above suggests, i *breathe* language. As my eyes scan a text, any text, i'm checking for linguisic signifiers, codes, sounding it out in my head - even when the argot in which something else is written is unfamiliar or comes from a culture i've never experienced, i tend to e pretty goodatworkingut what's going on pretty quickly. Everything from Irvine Welsh to crele poetry. if it's written in English I'll be playing the various different sound options in my head as i go, and given that i *know* you're familiar with how I speak, i'd assumed its phonetic notation would hold no terrors. Erroneously, obviously.

:o( i'm sorry you find it difficult. But by losing the linguistic intimacy i feel i'd lose the psychological intimacy too, and i don't want to do that. :o(

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

F'rexample would have been quite a bit easier to decode than f'rexmple - the typos and missing spaces don't help the situation. :)