I'm sure there are a lot of thing that generally seem socially accepted that really get under you skin. And I want to know them.

One for me would be the way in which people text. Using letters to represent full words don't work. And I'm not talking about "lol" or "brb." Shortening full sentences is fine. But typing U for a three letter word is just retarded. I always text with proper punctuation and capitalization. And for the most part, a phone will autocorrect misspellings. And seeing how terrible I am at spelling in the first place, if I can text without sounding like a 9 year old, so can you.

When people say "please" and "thank you" at work.

If someone asks me to do something, or I do something for someone as a part of my job duties, I hate it when people say please/thank you.

I am doing my job, not doling out personal favours. If you don't say please, I'm still going to do what you're asking because that's my job. Likewise, when I'm crawling on the ground plugging in a network cable that got loose, I don't want to hear overzealous thank yous when I come up.

Do you expect other people to fawn over you when you get your work done?

Do you say "Please? I would really appreciate it. You don't know how much this means to me!" to your mechanic?

Do you say "OMG! Thank you so much!!!" to your doctor after he checks your prostate?

No?

Then I don't want to hear it from you either, when I'm doing my job.

Further, if someone really wants to show their gratitude for my quick and professional service, they shouldn't be thanking me. I don't care; they're just meaningless words I've heard a million times before. What they should be doing is talking to my boss, telling him/her how great I am. Now that would be a real "thank you", not just some hollow platitude that wastes my time.

I have a perfect response to this thread....

HAPPY IWD!

International Women's Day celebrates the economic, political, and social achievements of women, past, present and future. Yay! ♥

International Men's Day focuses on male health, improving gender relations, promoting gender equality, and highlighting male role models.........

.... Wait a second...

Haha, I never thought of that!

@Thutmose: I generally just shorten it to "thanks". I'd say why, but I forgot my reasoning at "generally".

Anyway, what grinds my gears is casual swearing. It's offensive, yet more and more people are doing it. Even some kids. All of my co-workers do it, which is annoying. In fact, all of my co-workers at my last job... well, actually they were always angry, so it was an overdose of anger swearing, which is annoying, too. I miss the days when everyone was taught not to swear. If I ever have kids, you can be sure they'll be taught.

@ lantis: I am going to stab you in the face the next time I hear you say you're doing something one way rather than another under the reasoning that its 'easier'.

Double standards grind my gears.

I don't mind that so much. But sometime I just go to somebody's computer and click "Okay" and it's like I saved their first born child or something.

It isn't necessarily a case of double standards should he do so; his problem here stems from a dislike for the casual butchery of the English language. I'm right there with him, tbh.

In other situations unrelated to language abuse Lantis may adopt the 'easier' method without it being hypocrisy. It seems inappropriate to face-stab in a situation in which he does the easier thing, if the language-affection has been removed from the equation.


Touching upon something we discussed, I think one of the main reasons I kept up with Philosophy is because you learn how to see the structure of everyday ideas, arguments, etc. It's fascinating, enlightening.



I have a question.

Would you jump a 6-foot fence, or walk half a block to get around? Which do you think is easier?

Makes no sense to me, mang. Butchery? Hardly. He, you, everybody abbreviates words all the time. Him especially. PC, CPU, all that crap. Nobody has a problem with abbreviations like this - probably because they're multi-word nouns. Okay. How about single ones? Mr. Mrs. Ms. Sr. Dr. Can't even say they're allowed because of academia - they're allowed because, well, there's nothing wrong with them.

They make things easier.

Doesn't even stand strictly with nouns. "Can't". Two letters abbreviated, one character added. Net loss of one character. "Don't". Same deal. All contractions follow this sort of pattern, all are acceptable. People don't care about these, so why care about others? Because it's unclean? It's uneducated?

Pshaw.

It's like hating on african american english, you know, that particular style of English that everyone s**ts on. It's just as valid a communication tool as standard English whether you like the way it rubs you or not.

It's easier. Your message is still just as clear. No one is going to go around writing like that in any official setting. Yet people whine about it constantly. I really don't see how people go around saying that - it's like they don't even realize NOT doing it is considered weird these days. Just like NOT using social networking - if you don't do it you're the oddity, not everyone else for doing something you don't like for god knows what illogical reason.

What's it hurting? Your impression of the language?

No one cares. Language changes, as does how its used - the problem is how well you adapt to those changes. The slower you do, the faster you start to look like that old guy who doesn't quite "get it".

Gear teeth.

High gasoline prices.

I disagree. I see someone type "i think u r rong n i m so gr8" and get a headache.

If you seriously can't understand what that means, then you really need to re-evaluate your intelligence. Message clarity and how well you like looking at it are not connected.

Of course I know what it means, I typed it.
I just can't read it as fluently as, you know, proper grammar.

I'm with ^ on the casual swearing. People are profane, but setting off an F-bomb every other sentence is just stupid, and doesn't even seem realistic - just the maturity of a second grader trying to say his newly discovered curse word away from the ears of adults as much as possible. There is never a necessary or proper time to curse that much.



Chewing food unnecessarily loudly while playing a stream of Black-Eyed Peas songs over your cell phone and squabbling kids and their long-winded parents in restaurants while I try to enjoy in perfect innocence the company of my pretty waitress; THAT not only grinds my gears, it poses every danger of bringing Id back to destroy all of humanity and the word it lives on.

It seems like Dray thinks casual swearing is something new. It doesn't really bother me. Everyone in my family swears casually; my parents do, my grandparents do, and even my great grandparents used to before they passed away.

As for abbreviations, I'm with Dray and Lantis, and I think Stythe just likes to argue. And besides, this topic is about personal things that bother you, so his argument doesn't really matter. What bothers me most about the abbreviations such as "you" to "u", is when the people in my family, such as my parents, do it when they text me, and then I respond using proper English and grammar.

My argument does matter - I am directly addressing the source of this distaste for shorthand English. I also honestly believe disliking them is based on pure ignorance of language development, no matter how someone tries to say their distaste came about.



Another angle.

I hate people who are constantly sad, whiny, or depressed. I'm not bashing anyone in this topic, I swear! Those few people that can never seem to be happy or show a remote smile grind my gears. Thankfully post-high school I don't have to deal with this as often.



lol.

If it's not something new, then I'm being exposed to a lot more of it than when I was a kid.

Direct, really?

Acronyms are one thing. They're sometimes ugly as hell but they started off as a necessity; since it's awfully hard to have a technical conversation in some fields if you're not using them. As you say, they're about ease of communication. The thing is, acronyms are generally the preserve of the educated, the jargon-fluent. This significantly distinguishes them from lolspeak.

Contractions are another thing entirely. If anything, words with contractions are an archaic predecessor of sorts to modern textspeak and their number has decreased over recent generations. Their use in any great quantity is frowned upon in formal writing. It's a pretty interesting comparison between them and textspeak, though.


In both cases of acronyms and contractions, there are conventions. As you say, there are patterns and when people work by those patterns, things make sense. Textspeak is probably coming to possess these patterns, so it's not necessarily a strike against it that it doesn't yet have them. Again, as you say, languages evolve and we should expect the English language to develop. But the word 'evolution' belies the truth; isn't this process something we have some tiny shred of responsibility over? It is our language. We teach it, we speak it, write it. We coin terms. How are we not responsible for it?

So I have to ask; what's wrong with caring about it? I heard that slightly vitriolic Stephen Fry podcast when it first released. Tell me, would you have paid it as much respect, would it have been as easy on the ears, had it not been spoken in nigh-on perfect and fluent english? Also, frankly, he talks about taking pleasure in the use of language, not about endorsing textspeak. It is also worth noting that he is not the mouthpiece of objective truth.

So to scud gently onwards, the next thought is the final point you raised. Why care about text language (and I am going to keep it specific)? As you said, 'what's it hurting?'

I'm going to point at the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. If we accept the hypothesis we may be led to think that language is closely related to thought, that thought may even depend upon language. I'm sure there are other reasons to care, but Sapir-Whorf is kinda fun, so there we go.


I'm also going to note as an aside that many of the 14-19 year old students I've been teaching cannot write in standard english nowadays. They can't even spell 'great', or 'laugh out loud', because all they write is 'gr8 lol'. they've no idea how grammar works. Honestly, they're barely literate. I assume that this is a wider problem than text language, but the fact that gr8 is all they know is... unfortunate. For them, most of all.


...

Incidentally it generally isn't great practice to be appealing to a silent majority; 'everyone', 'no-one cares', etc, to stuff any potential breaches in one's argumentation. Also I'm sure it's possible to have logical reasons not to socially network. Some fairly awesome people in my acquaintance don't, who aren't themselves old, or weird... well no, they are a little odd, but that's hardly a bad thing! =D

doublepost.

I have to note that I personally am fairly unconcerned about the whole issue. I present the opposing view without holding it.

Perhaps I should care more, but really I only got involved because I enjoy the occasional chance to wrangle an alligator.

argument*