OT: To "prolly" or not...
I've never seen the "prolly" discussion before, but I have seen the "all
caps" discussion and the "no caps" discussion and the "uses ... instead
of periods and commas" discussion and the "mispells everything"
discussion the "your/you're, there/their/they're, who's/whose and
it's/its" discussion and a dozen others like it. They all go roughly
like this:
1. Original poster posts peeve about some manner of posting that drives
him/her nuts.
2. Other posters chime in about how much that bothers them too.
3. Discussion broadens out to include other peeves.
4. Plea is made for people to make their messages more easily
understood/read.
5. Poster for the dissent says that s/he speaks English as a second
language and is being made to feel uncomfortable about
typing/grammar/spelling skills. (Or sometimes time constraints or
arthritis are given as reasons for typing the way one does.)
6. Original poster says that while some excuses for obnoxious
communications are acceptable, other messages are simply too hard to be
bothered with. Repeat offenders are killfiled.
7. Errors are found in the messages written by those who purport to
support good spelling and good grammar. Those people are now dubbed
pompous.
8. All hell breaks loose with accusations flying. "If you want me to
read your messages, write them so I can read them." "Don't be so mean
to poor arthritic poster who's typing the best she can." "Pompous!"
"Asshole!"
9. If there's a moderator, the moderator gets on to tell everyone to
cut it out. If not, accusations continue for a while until all get bored.
I've found that I can even cut to the chase by admitting that I killfile
people who post in a way I always find difficult to read without naming
the specific habits that are too much trouble to bother with.
--Lia
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