h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You don't like capitals in letters?



- UnderGuide Editor

wHaT i DoNt LiKe Is SeNteNcEs LiKe ThIs

understand now?

I was kidding

you still havent answered me tho! you have got an opinion on txt talk what about sentences where there are capital letters every other letter?

Oh those bother me.

I also hate names that have no spaces in them, like JoDaN.~MINING~.42~IhaveANobnoxiouslyLONGname~and.no.breaks.in.between.all.of.the.words~LOL!)-:

It screws up the who's online list

Jodan, I saw this convo and was about to say exactly what you said in post #3: "I just hate what they're doing to English. Especially us Americans, who have apparently already ruined english."

As part of the "generation whatever" responsible for this abomination of language, I must say that people who hate text speech are NOT just old fuddy-duddies. I detest it too, and I'm only 19. My humble believe is that the use of text speech on the internet makes a poor first impression. Poor grammar and spelling can be forgiven. Deliberate crappy English cannot.

I mean no offense to you, Diddy. I'm not saying I hate the PEOPLE who use text speech; as you've said, you'll do what you please no matter what I think (which is completely within your rights!).

You know the saying, "Don't hate the player, hate the game?" Well, I hate the game.

Oh, and as for the posts you've seen with 20+ smilies... some of the people around here really love h2g2's smilies. They're unique to the community, and a lot of the time they express things, just like words do. But for the most part, they're just fun and silly.

Yay for sea! I agree with you totally.

I too am nineteen, and abhor the prevalence of txtspk. It's bad enough on the internet, and when people use it to SMS me on my mobile, but it's even worse when advertisers use it on purpose. But that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

Personally, I don't have a problem with abbreviations. Sometimes they're just easier, sometimes they're just indicative of how the person would talk if they're actually speaking. But I loath wen ppl strt 2 tlk lk ths.

As was said before, vowels are there for a reason. Use them.

I work as a receptionist for a (very small) recruiting company, and as a part of my job, I have to plough through the 100s of submissions we get for each job, and weed out the totally unsuitable ones so that the actual recruiters can do their job.

The amount of applications (and even resumes) that we get that contain txtspk is absolutely boggling - and I'll be the first to admit that these are usually the ones that get culled first. Why? Because it shows laziness and a disregard for clear communication. And especially when applying for an office role (which we recruit for a lot), those are bad traits to have.

In short? txtspk bad. And don't get me started on punctuation and capitalisation...

Good points

i don't hate (or h8)text speakers. i just don't understand nine tenths of what is being written, so i give up. it's only in the last two weeks that i found out lol means laugh out loud. i'd been going round thinking it meant lots of love.

xx

That must have been confusing

ah, but lol is not textspeak, lol is from from usenet along with the likes of lmao, rofl and roflmao and are part of the unique usent / internet subculture from long before txtspk ever came about. The difference being that they are not vowel removals. (hmm, that sounds painful).

I'll admit I find that text speak is annoying and, perhaps a sign of increasing intellectual snobbery in myself, seems to bias my thoughts about the sender towards thinking perhaps they are a bit educationally challenged and are glorifying in their ignorance.

I try not to submit to the above thoughts however

This thread isn't just about text speak

I actually was more concerned with LOL and ROFLMAO type of stuff when I started it

I tend to think of people who do this frequently (LOL and ROFL stuff is fine, but only because so many people do it ) not as being uneducated, because I know a lot of educated people who do it, but perhaps a bit less mature than I.

Well, I'm officially a fuddy duddy

Oh I know it isn;t just text speak on trial here, but the post from daraline seemed to imply (to me anyway!) that it was considered as such. i was just trying to clarify that not all indecipherable acronyms are from the nokia generation!

Sub cultures will always develop their own specialised jargons and languages. I saw in the paper the other day that apparently the 1950's slang from the, at the time outlawed, homosexual culture is starting to make a bit of a comeback. Can;t remember what it was called, the one kenneth Williams used in 'round the horn' on radio (not that I am old enough to remember that!)

Occasionally something will hit the mainstream, like the 'all your base belong to us' or whatever it was. It is, I suppose, an interesting way to keep a tab on currrent subcultures.

It's Polari Ictoan, and bits of it are certainly in everyday use.

Oh and, "all your base are belong to us" Oh God I'm such a geek.

ah yes, thanks KA

I got quite confused at the beginning with LOL, LMAO, IMO and various BTW but, well, I finally got used to it, after all it is no worse than 'etc.' or 'e.g.' (or 'viz.'), once you know what it means it's fine.

On the other hand, I seem to be having tremendous difficulties with txt speech, as it's not just an occasional word (or phrase) getting shortened, but all words getting, well, transformed, in such a way that it is quite difficult to reconstruct the original message (cutting out vowels is a real killer, then replacing letters by numbers that sound the same, or look the same... That's too many transformations at the same time for me). I wouldn't mind having to reconstruct a txt sentence into English as a game, but actually having to read whole postings and following a conversation written in txt is a bit hard to me, and I tend to give up easily then .

Ictoan

I didn't figure out IMO until I got to this site. I hadn't seen it before.

I guess a lot of h2g2'ers have a lot of opinions

aye, the rest of the web uses IMHO or IMNSHO

I guess HooTooers make no pretense about being humble

You all know IANAL as well? That took me a few posts, but as I used to frequent the anti spam groups it quickly became clear !