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:
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.
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.
