Linguistic Mission Statement, or why i talk nonsense in the way i do : comments [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. :)

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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(

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

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Like a Can Opener in a Worm Factory

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