10:31 PM
Rants & Whines god. write in English

>> all ur scenes r sum of my fave scenes also!!!!
>
> god. write in English

god. I am pretty damn old cause I agree with that. write in English.

I come from the old school, the one where the nuns would not only rap ur nukels bloody for that kind of spelling, they'd make you stand in the corner for an hour, too.

But I suspect that before I die, that kind of phonetic shorthand will become the standard, that people will perceive it as too much trouble to learn to spell or write properly. Everything is based on a 30 second attention span these days, why should we spend more than 30 seconds on spelling and reading and writing?

Roger Daltrey had it right, "I hope I die before I get old"...or at least before that sort of atrocious style of communication becomes commonplace. What's really sad is that misspelled line at the top was probably written by a college or high school student who learned online communication in chat rooms and now it's spread into his/her speech in other online forums (it was posted to a mailing list I'm on) and it won't be long before it spreads to the rest of his/her written communications.

I can deal with plain old spelling mistakes (although it makes my fingers itch to edit them out :)) and plain old grammar mistakes, then/than, etc., but this phonetic shorthand is a deliberate thing, not just people who can't spell and that's what irks me so much. I grew up reading books and learned that language, not the four-syllable stuff, the ordinary everyday language, can be a beautiful thing, it can create whole worlds in our heads and inspire us to be more than we are. It's an amazing thing, language and I hate to see it trashed.

[sigh]

And that rant leads me to the word of the day:

segue, pronounced: SEG-way: To proceed without interruption; to make a smooth transition.

Does that pronunciation spelling look familiar? It should, it's the name of that people-mover thing that's selling for a couple thousand on Amazon.com. The name of it should have been "Segue", only the marketing people took a look at that and said "see-gooey? What the heck's that?" and after someone explained the proper pronunciation and definition, the marketroids said, "The average consumer is too stupid to know that, we have to spell it like it's pronounced or they won't buy our product!"

Sheesh. This dumbing-down is why so many Americans think that the United Kingdom is Disneyland. We used to expect more of ourselves, now we expect nothing and so we get even less.

One last thing, do me favor, go learn a new word, any word as long as it's one you didn't know before. Go to Dictionary.com and type in anything to find a new word you didn't know. Or use the thesaurus link there to look up a word you know, then look up the synonyms for it. Just expand your vocabulary by one word and you'll make me happy!