Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Fun with Polls Chatspeak?

I was just arguing with someone the other day about whether if it is better to use chatspeak or if it is better to use correct English on the Net. I want to know what you guys think. I myself prefer correct English (as you can see me using).

Do you mean forums -- where the pace is slower and the posts can be seen for a long time? Or IRC/AIM/chat, where the pace is quick, and the messages ephemeral?

I meant both, actually, but more adressing live chat.

Ok. Based on your response, I voted for the second option. I need to be able to chat quickly. So I forgo capitals and only fix spelling mistakes that really bug me or make what I said indecipherable.

But posts on forums have far more permanence. I type them more slowly, and with more thought. I spell-check them, and will go back and edit errors that I notice after posting (which isn't really possible in chat).

OTOH, "chatspeak" like "wtvr" drives me 'round the bend. Just call me an old fogey.

For the most part, my IMs look exactly the way I speak. I have a friend that I sim with who I know has the ability to write correctly, but for some reason he likes to talk like....oh, sample!: 'ur goin 2 g 2 da chat 2day neway?' Or something horribly along those lines. And he's British! And reasonably intelligent! And I know he can write properly, because I've seen him do it! But he has to speak like that! ARGH!

As I was saying, in chatrooms and IMs I am, for the most part, typing the same way I do here, fixing my typoes immediately. But I do say things like 'I g2g' or 'ttyl' or even an occasional 'cya.' And of course I say stuff like 'lol' and use smilies. But I really try to stay correct.

I'm a big fan of correct English. I don't care if people capitalize or not. I don't always do it. Acronyms are cool, though. When it comes to posting, I take the time to type correctly and spell everything out. Live chats are fast and furious sometimes, but to me posting tends to be a reflection of how much you care about getting your point across to people. I'm more likely to read posts that have actual words instead of stuff like ne1 wuz up peeps or whatever.

JD

Correct English, please! I truly dislike chat speak - one of my friends uses it in emails and I already have a very hard time understanding it in French. In English it's mission impossible. For the sake of all non natives among us (though I'm sure that it's for the sake of many natives as well), correct English... or else I'll start writing fanfic such as: "U r not gonna b-lieve it: Lois luvs Clark 4 ever." Ick.

Kaethel

English isn't native to me either but living in Canada helps a lot. BTW, you are so lucky living in France. I visited it 3 years ago and ever since I've wanted o go back (I was around Paris).

/me reads Kae's threat

/me runs screaming from the room, gouging out her eyes along the way

I voted for correct English, but I think of that as more of an ideal than a requirement. When I'm chatting, I'm typing fast and may or may not fix (or even notice! ) my errors/typos. But I do use real words for the most part, apart from stuff like re, cya, afk. Of course, I'm a pretty fast touch-typist. I prefer for everyone else to use correct English, too, which 99% of us do, I think. At least of my regular and semi-regular chat buddies. Hoewever, I have goten fluen tin raeding "typo"!

PJ

Chat speak makes me sick. It's the reason I don't talk to my little sister online. She drives me nuts! I wondered if it was an age/generation thing, but she is 20 and still does it while teenagers on this board use perfect English. Then I thought maybe it reflected on a person's intelligence . . . but, no, my sister is pretty smart. Finally, I decided it is lazyness. How much harder is it to type you instead of u, and how much harder is it to type anyway instead of neway. I mean, my gosh, it's only one more letter! The one that makes me laugh is my best friend's sister (who is 19 and is my sister's friend) uses sum=some and a very similar c word =come . . . and both words have different meanings that she didn't even realize! I noticed that when I am on IM, I tend not to capitolize things. However, when I am posting, I write complete sentances always. I think chatting is more like a conversation rather than a soliloque trying to show your opinion.

- LaUrA ;)nEwAy, KaEtHeL, iF u WrT uR fIc lIkE tHaT, IlL wRt MiNe LiKe ThIs (omg (oh, that's an abreviation I use because some people might be offended by the entire phrase that I mean) that was so hard to do! It took me like 5 minutes to write that sentance making sure I was capitolizing the right letters in the right pattern -- and I see I missed one!)

- Laura

PS I can't spell at all -- those people that have chatted with me know that . Add that to the fact that I don't touch type, and often you have me writing things that look likeI am crazy.

PPS I am done studying for my exam However, I have to be up in just under 4 hours. We'll see how good I feel in the morning .

Hah! We just had a big thread war about this on samandjack (YahooGroup for SG1's Sam and Jack shippers) - one very educated college student, smart, from the sounds of it, insisted that we all try to decipher her 'netspeak', as she called it, and a lot of people tried to pursuade her that it's just not right on a mailing list - maybe for online chatting in real time with your friends, but not when you are trying to communicate ideas and have time to edit yourself. Agh, it's a closed archive, so I can't send you there to see the thread... oh well...

Melisma (shutting up for a while, here under her Rock - maybe it will help her laryngitis?)

Chatspeak drives me nuts when I see it on a messageboard forum and I'm in sync with Kaethel and Pam on it being used in chat channels.

Typos are a different thing, I think - those don't bother me at all. And I'll use various abbreviations at times. But wholesale chatspeak just fogs my brain.

Course, just recently, when I actually had to text a message to someone, I realised what a dashed awkward, time-consuming, fiddly thing it is - and began to be a little more understanding of why chatspeak developed in the first place! I cannot believe that millions of kids up and down the world do this for fun all day!

So, I guess it's tolerable in its original setting of mobile phones. But it irks me when I see it too much elsewhere.

LabRat

I use english with fewer capitals, usually. I always capitalize certain words, but more often than not, it's too much trouble to hit the shift key. I don't mind typos or abbreviations, like lol, rofl, bbl, etc. I abhor chatspeak, though, no matter the context. I've yelled at friends and family on ICQ for using "u" and "ne1". And things like l33t sp34k gives me the absolute willies, and unless it's used in a joking manner, I *will* go off on that person.

Why on earth 'no capitals'? Personally, I find it much more difficult to read text written this way, and I just don't see why it's a problem to use them. Sorry, Paul, I know you write like this, and I'm sure you have very good reasons for it, so I'm not having a 'go' at you. Otherwise, you write very nice, easily read English, which makes up for the lack of capitals.

To be honest, though, I have had to backtrack when reading no-capital text when I've realised I missed that tiny little full-stop nestling in amongst all those same-size, same-spaced letters. <g>

Yvonne
(defender to the bitter end of good grammar and punctuation, even if she doesn't always get it right herself <g>)

PS: I was still writing this when you posted, Karen, so although it looks like a slightly cranky response to your comment, it's not meant to be!

I voted for Correct English, but there is a middle ground, as others have mentioned. Maybe I should have gone for your second option, English but no caps, but that really didn't fit what I mean.

I personally use proper capitalization/punctuation most of the time on IRC, but I also use acronyms common to FoLCdom -- LOL, ROTFL, re, OMG, brb, afk, etc. Not to mention the acronyms we all use for episode titles.

That said, I agree completely that chatting quickly on IRC is a different thing than making posts to the listserv or message boards, and different rules apply. I have been known to edit my posts several times on the boards, in order to make sure I'm saying just what I intended to. But if someone corrects my spelling on IRC, I'm going to be annoyed -- it's kind of an unspoken rule on the channel that the occasional typo is to be expected in chat. The only time I might retype on IRC is if I think my meaning was unclear -- leaving out a "not" before a verb, for example. But otherwise, I figure if people can figure it out, there's no reason to restate it.

As for full "chatspeak", as an adult, I find it childish and very annoying, though luckily it's not something we've had to deal with very much in FoLCdom. As something fun between teenaged friends, it probably does little harm, but I think the danger is when it becomes a habit. Like swearing, it might be something that doesn't raise eyebrows amongst your peers, but if you slip and use it in a professional situation (that college internship, your first job interview), you are going to find yourself very embarrassed. I did recruiting for several years, and trust me, people *do* talk about you when you screw up like this.

Kathy (who could tell some amazing stories about new employees' faux pas)

Correct English!
I have to go with Kaethel & the cheerleaders here; Chatspeak:

I was reading a little from the Delta Goodrem forum the other day, and there were so many that wrote like that and it really, really bothered me.

And they even had nick names like that: ~~Buttafly~~, MeLuvsDelta, DeltaForeva, Deltagurl etc..

Personally, and I can't really explain why, but whenever I see people write like that, I tend to take them less serious...does anybody know what I mean?

Anyway, I have to admit that whenever I chat, and everything's going so quickly, I might end up writing 'gonna' instead of 'going' before I can think it over, although it doesn't happen that often, but I know I've done it sometimes...although maybe it doesn't fit to be a part of 'chatspeak', I don't know. Other than that, I don't write that way at all.

Pelican

Jumping on the bandwagon here with my vote for proper English. Those who know me well know that this is one of my biggest pet peeves. I always use full sentences and proper capitalization and punctuation on message boards. When chatting, the atmosphere is definitely more informal, but still, it's only relatively recently - within the last year or so - that I've even started using common internet abbreviations. And I'm still more likely to type, "That's so funny!" rather than "lol". Typos and the occassional misspelling or dropped capitalization doesn't bother me at all. There's no need for correction as long as the meaning is clear. I actually tend to drop capitals sporadically because one of my shift keys sticks and I'm not about to retype every single time it doesn't work. But I think that is far removed from dialogue like, "C-U L8er" and "OIC". Like many others I don't think that there is anything inherently wrong with this, I just think it makes the speaker (or typist, I guess) look immature and uninteligent, which is unfortunate given that this is far from true most of the time. Also, I tend to react differently depending on who does it. When my friend's little sister (who's 16) does it, I roll my eyes good naturedly. Kids these days. <G> When my 45 year old aunt does it, it makes me cringe. The woman worked as a receptionist for years. She types at least 50 wpm, and I'm the only person she's talking to online. There is no reason she's in such a hurry that she needs to type "oic" rather than "oh, I see." And I was NOT pleased when my reporters would IM me like that when I was their editor. I know we are students, but this is a professional paper. Don't ask me about your assignment with a message that makes me wonder if you even speak English. Please.

Coming late to this thread, having been away from a PC all day - and all I can do is echo everyone else, really! Actually, I'm somewhat surprised, but also very pleased, to see how many of us feel the same way about this.

I hate 'chatspeak' and 'txt-speak' with a vengeance. As others have said, what is so difficult about writing 'anyone' instead of (the version I've seen) N E one - which actually takes longer to type?!

But the reason I was surprised is that we have had in recent years a few younger FoLCs - and at least one not all that young - who seemed to like 'txt-speak' and even used it on message boards - I remember one person telling us that he used it because he was 'young' (in his 20s, I think) and it was 'kewl', unlike writing in proper English. I think we were meant to assume that we were not young and not cool...

At the same time, though, I probably shouldn't be that surprised. A couple of people have mentioned fanfic - and I think lots of us recognise how far superior L&C fanfic is to fanfic in many other fandoms in terms of its presentation: spelling, grammar, syntax etc. Sure, Archive GEs help, but in my several years as a GE I've very rarely seen stories as poorly presented as I've seen in other fandoms.


Wendy

I'll try not to use that one anymore . . .

I haven't voted yet... I can't quite decide which option I fit with.

I'd like to say proper English all the time, but I know of people who have difficulties with reading and writing and they find it easier to communicate using chatspeak.

In fact this came up as an issue on an email group I'm in, when a couple of members came down hard on another member because her emails weren't 'proper English', and she had to explain why she couldn't write in 'proper English', and wasn't it enough that she was particpating to the best of her ability.

So actually I think I'll abstain.

As for this...

Jus'cuz yoower British divn'mean ya can speak English proper.

That's Cumbrian for you. Very British

Helga

I voted 'English with no capitals', but that's not exactly what I do.

I surely use LOL, re, and such 'words' quite often. Less often I use 'I'm gonna', 'I wanna', 'yeah' or 'yep', (which I find very funny btw [that too, depending on the situation though]) and stuff like this, and for some reason I always say goodbye as 'see ya'.
I never use 4eva, luv u or any of that supposed 'teen chatspeak'.
Capitalizing depends... When I chat I almost always capitalize, except for the beginning of a sentence and for I, which I capitalize in a very strange way:
I don't capitalize it in the beginning of a sentence,
I don't capitalize it when I'm writing only one sentence,
I do capitalize it in the second sentence of a message-to-be-sent:

<AnnaBtG> oh, i didn't know
<AnnaBtG> i didn't know. I thought it had happened by accident.

Same with periods. I never put one if it's only one sentence, but if they are more in a message-to-be-sent I put periods in all of them.
The rest of the punctuation I use in a normal way.

As a non-native English speaker, my English grammar and vocabulary could surely be better, but 1) I'm a perfeccionist, 2) I hate mistakes or people that make mistakes especially when speaking, 3) I want to be taken in seriously (something that can't be always easy in a society where most of the people are at least ten years older than me, no offence anyone). So, I always use the best of my grammar when chatting. Sometimes I even want to reply to something that was written by someone else, I write what I want to say, then realize I've made mistakes and try to correct them, and it finally takes me so long I finally don't say it at all :rolleyes:
I don't commit typos often, but when I do I edit them using *'s. My mistakes are usually misspellings of words I don't know well and I'm not in the mood to check in the dictionary.

When I post on the boards, OTOH, or write e-mails I'm more strict. I would never leave something un-capitalized or un-punctuated and I always check the dictionary for words I don't know. But I'm still kinda 'light' with it, as I know the little of this that I occasionally do doesn't annoy people.

The only thing I am extremely, awfully, very, very, very, very strict with is writing fics. I try to use the best of my language knowledge there.

So, in general, I agree with most of the people that posted here. Chatspeak irritates me and I don't use it, except for some expressions that are 'standard'.

After all, my English is problematic anyway... if I used chatspeak too nobody would understand what I would be saying!

AnnaBtG. (wondering if all this babbling made any sense)

P.S.: I chat with a girl from New York. She has some problem with typing, I don't know exactly what (she never told me, and I wouldn't want to be indiscreet). I swear, if I didn't know she has this problem, I would never talk to her anymore. It's giving me a hard time to understand what she means by 'hi wuzzup i went to teh moveis tonitgh an it was fun'.

P.P.S.: I commit many 'typos' when speaking. On Tuesday I nearly asked for 'ticket buses' instead of 'bus tickets'!!

Anna, don't worry. I am exactly your age. In fact, you are a couple of months older than me.

But then I know lots of you guys are older than we are. That reminds me again of what my friend said a couple of days ago:

Margot (that's my friend): Superman is for little kids.
Julie: (defensively) Well, almost everyone in the forum I visit are grown up and older than me.
Margot: Well but I bet they're not as obsessed as you are.
Julie: Believe me, if you are obsessed enough to join a forum and write fanfic you are very obsessed.
Margot: Well, then again there'e lots of grown ups in mad houses.

With the last comment I was sulking for the entire class (This was at school).

For more info about this friend I have refer to my signature.

(I realise this post had nothing to do with the thread and chatspeak but I had to say something about that. )

Julie

That's us! Howling, barking mad!

I'm going to tout ieSpell again. You don't have to haul out the dictionary, it catches all my silly typos (except when I manage to type a real word, just not the one I want ), and it can download other dictionaries so you can spell-check other languages.

It's a quick download, and the program is an add-on for Internet Explorer.

well, i've been kind of ignoring this thread. i guess mostly it was that i didn't check the voting options and i didn't realize that there was room for my middle ground.

anyway, i just voted. i'm sure you'll all be shocked to learn that i chose "english with no capitals."

i don't like chatspeak like l33t and all that stuff, but i do find acronyms (lol, rofl, brb, and yes, sometimes even oic) handy. in my teens, i used to think l8r was cool, but i grew out of that quickly enough.

as for typos, i'm somewhat dyslexic and i don't have a good rote memory. so, spelling was never my strong suit.

basically, i have two guiding principles when it comes to boards, email, and irc... (1) i write like i talk. (2) if it saves a few keystrokes and is still easily/generally understandable, i'm all for it.

now, yvonne said:

thanks. i appreciate the compliment, and the fact that you took the time to address me specifically.

i do try to use proper grammar. that was drilled into me since i was a little kid. (the worst was when my 8th grade english teacher, using some presumably psychic ability, managed to make every grammatical error within a week of my mother correcting me for the same thing. actually, even worse was a particular incident when she decided to make a point of something. she randomly came up to my desk, breath smelling of some powerful and recent lunch, and shouted to me and the classrom at large "the reason is because..." that was mom's biggest grammatical pet peeve, one which she faithfully passed on to me. <sigh>)

back to the subject at hand...

i'm sorry to dissapoint you, yvonne, but, while i do have my reasons for not using capitals, they aren't particularly good. first of all, i can get my meaning across just as well without having to press the shift key. imagine how much work i've saved my pinky over the years. (as i once explained to wendy, my first archive GE, it's amazing the extent to which americans will go in order to be lazy... ) secondly, like i said above, i write like i speak. as far as i'm concerned, i don't use capital letters when i'm talking.

i guess what it really comes down to is that it's easier and it feels more natural to me. i'm sure you'll also be surprised to discover that i write most of my posts stream-of-conciousness style (even more so than when i'm talking). the words flow better (and i'm happier) when i don't have to stop and think about capital letters. so, i only use caps when necessary for clarity (like i did in the previous paragraph for "GE") and when i "sign" messages ("paul" is capitalized at the end of my posts, when used as a signature, but, like any other name, is not capitalized when used in the body of the post).

that's all there is to it.

i'm sure you're all facinated.

oh, and for the record, it took months of chastisment before i learned to put a reasonable number of paragraph breaks in my messages. so, you can thank the mitaah-discussion list (and, in particular, ken lu) for that. i resisted that break in my thought train as long as i could, too. had a lot of trouble sorting my stream-of-conciousness rambles into paragraphs. i just don't think in paragraphs, you know?

okay, this time, that's really it. for this post, anyway.

Paul

p.s. in case you haven't checked, julie, you're up in the caption thread.

Anna, your post made me remember something my new advisor told me when I was making a presentation.

Without even realizing it, I say "yeah" all the time! He told me it is really unprofessional and doesn't sound definate. According to JTM, "Yes" sort of signifies a finality, that you are absolutely sure of the answer. According to him, "Yeah" is a slang term that mostly used by younger people and is just really unprofessional and makes you sound unsure. That really got me thinking. JTM is in his 60's and is a very prim and proper man (even though he has a VERY heavy Texas drawl . . . which sounds funny since he's been in Cleveland since the '60's! . . . but he hates the word "yeah".

So he made me sort of paranoid for my presentation. (this was a PhD committee meeting in front of 4 very well respected professors, only one of whom I had actually met before). After every question, I started saying "yeah" and stopped midword and said "yes". Then I realized, every one of the other professors except JTM used the word "yeah" instead of "yes"! They were all younger than JTM -- the oldest was probably in his 40's and the youngest in her early 30's, 2 were foriegn (one from China, the other from somewhere in South America (I can't remember where)). All have PhDs and are very well respected in their respective fields. They all say "yeah" repeatedly.

So I really wonder, how common is it to say "yeah"? Is it just an American thing or do Canadians/Australians/Europeans also say "yeah"? Is it more a thing younger people do or is it widespread (or are my committee members an anomole)? I know I say "yeah" quite often still, but I am more conscious of it and whenever I don't mean to be wishy washy, I am trying to make myself say yes. Plus, yes is only three letters compared to yeah .


- Laura

Laura, I live in Canada and I say 'yeah' constantly! I can't imagine starting to say 'yes' all the time because it seems a bit unnatutal to me - just like I say 'can't' instead of 'cannot', and 'I'm' instead of 'I am'. Its basically the same deal for me with 'yeah' only its closer to being a slang abbreviation rather than a grammatical abbreviation.

Will it come as any suprise that I abhor "chatspeak" ? It seems to be the opinion of choice on the boards today. No, chatspeak is not a "teen" thing. It is a "lazy" thing. It's used to shorten the words you have to type and lengthen the time it takes you to read replies

She don't know us too well, do she?

LabRat

My friends and I very seldom, if ever, use "yeah". Instead, we say "yah", rather like the German "ja". I have no idea where that comes from, since German influence in Singapore is practically non-existant. But there you go.

However, if a question is asked in a more formal setting, we naturally go back to "yes". Or say somebody of a higher authority asks you a question (eg a teacher asking a student something), you answer "yes". It's more formal, and shows more respect than "yah".

But that's an interesting question. I had to think about it before giving an answer. :p


metwin1

Hi!

I need to say that I agree with you AnnaBtG in:

I tend to correct people in pronunciation and/or semantics(a thing that most people don't like but I can't help it)

I think older people than me, take me more seriously when I speak correctly than if I use common 'words' between teens, so I do and try to use good vocabulary and grammar. For example it takes me longer to start to use new 'words' or abreviations than it takes most of my friends. Some of them I don't use at all because I just *don't* like them.

In chat talk I write with a couple of abreviations because I want to write fast and I can't say that I don't have typos, it'll be a complete lie. So it doesn't bother me too much when I'm in a chat and the other person doesn't write correctly or completes his/her sentence.

Anyway as I said I like correct spelling and grammar...All of this in Spanish (my mother language)

In English: thanks God most Folcs write correctly, if everybody started writing with numbers and consonants it would be a nightmare to try understand what you're saying! I've tried understand some of your examples of those words/sentences and... stop trying

When I was new to the boards and you wrote with <g>/<bg>/ASAP/ITOH/IMHO and acronyms for L&C titles, I was lost, I even thought some were words in english

Still there's sentences of some post that I don't understand due to some words that I don't know their meaning and when I try to write a post it takes me at least half an hour to write it (and there too, I *try* to write correctly, I know my english it's not the best) sometimes as AnnaBtG I don't post at all.

Carolyn

i've got nothing to add at this point, so i'll keep it brief (for once ). i just came across this 'net comic strip today (well, i've been reading the strip for a while now -- since bethy pointed it out to me -- but i just read this particular one now), and thought i'd share.

it's part of a larger storyline, but i think it makes enough sense as a stand-alone.

http://www.ozyandmillie.org/2003/om20030403.html

Paul