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

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