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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the_myth" data-source="post: 3675120" data-attributes="member: 20081">Bravo, Arbiter of Wyrms, for being able to constrain yourself and create a thread to vent!I'm not a formally trained in linguistics, but I am a folklorist, so I am a huge advocate of the acknowledgment of vernacular speech.  But I am also an old English major who is now in a doctoral program studying Communication.  Every time I teach, I see the decaying of the respect for the English language.  I don't entirely blame the Internet [IM/chat rooms/blogs and bulletin boards] for this loss, but it certainly is a contributing factor!While it's perfectly understandable for typos to crop up in informal speech/writing, some people seem to think the basic rules of English grammar and punctuation are now optional.  Were they not taught them in elementary school like the rest of us?  According to some of my students, they weren't!  [Now THAT is scary.]  But that doesn't explain the people who willfully ditch some of the basics because they're typing too fast to actually make their communication understandable.I'm subscribing to this thread, and I hope those of us confounded by bad writing can use it to "let off steam" from time to time...Well, there's one problem with this argument:Not every ENWorlder is as "L33T" as all the others.  We are not a community of equals with regard to having an encyclopedic database of all the new lingo that, seriously, only a portion of certain tech-savvy people are all that proficient in anyway.This goes back to Arbiter's parting comment:  If you want your audience to understand you, you need to speak in such a way that THEY will understand you.  Most of them aren't impressed by the fancy lingo; in fact, many will be immediately put off.As such, you can reasonable expect most people to understand LOL or d20 or even IMHO, but there are some abbreviations that I *NEVER* get, even by reading in context.  Speaking in code is really only for others who know the code [which is why not every character has access to Thieves' Cant or Druidic!  hehe].</blockquote>

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