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President of your heart, baby!
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Get off my lawn! (Formerly "Greetings, hello, and welcome!") Ordinarily this area is devoted to "a few words about me", but I am 25 (formerly 24) years old and I did not get this far by not telling people to get off my lawn (formerly "by telling people about myself"). Instead, you can go on an exciting voyage of non-self-discovery (unless you're myself - and I know I am!) by reading my posts. They date back to February of 2004 - that's more than a shit-ton (formerly three) years of quality!
I love blogging. I love this joint. And just as I predicted, this blog was ten gallons of fun in a one gallon jug. Then the jug split and burst, forcing me to find another one, and since I was unable to find a suitable replacement, I have a bunch of cups sitting around, full of fun. And one of the cups is full of scorpions! So if you decide to have a look around, watch your step.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present: Drawing Blog v2.0. (It has nothing to do with drawing, please stop sending me angry e-mails about that.)
Multiple hours of mine that have been finest (at special request):
For the love of God, and all that is holy: Contact Me!
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Wednesday, October 12, 2005
The Modern Parlance (or, Ramble Mode: Activated)
As a person of great moral rectitude, diverse interests, and +3 intelligence, I tend to enjoy the exploration of a surprising array of topics. But there are few I enjoy so much as language; this is not merely because of the fact that, let's face it, it is our one advantage over the teeming swarms of squid people who shall invade in 2017, but also because it's just so damn interesting. It baffles and intrigues me that early humans developed these goofy little abstract and arbitrary utterances to represent certain concrete ideas. And then Don King came along, and devised an entirely new vocabulary which does not, apparently, have any basis in this particular reality, and things got really interesting.
So the point is that language does not seem to me to have been a guaranteed development - it seems more like the invention of a madman, much like a fireaxe (for who else would dream of attacking fire with an axe?) - and this, combined with the diversity language has taken on, piques my interest and also my hunger for a delicious block of cheddar, which is not called "the thinking cheese" for nothing.
Actually, I guess I could have ended that sentence two words earlier and made it a lot more accurate.
Anyway, the upshot of all that stuff is that I'm interested in language. This is why I halfway deplore the devolution into gibberish that the Internet and text messaging via cellphone seem to be causing in the language, but it is worth commenting that a major factor in my stance towards that is because it is easy and fun to rant about it. Of course, language tends to change over time despite such influences, not because of them - it exhibits an extremely apparent evolutionary course (though, I hasten to add for purposes of my own defense, evolution in a non-teleologic sense, which is not a connection many people seem to automatically make when hearing the word "evolution"; they assume it is evolution in the sense of bettering rather than changing). There is a reason unrelated to the squid people that we have hundreds or thousands of distinct languages on Earth today, after all.
This is evident today mostly in the emergence of dialects. I notice, for example, that my mode of diction is markedly different from that of most of the people I work with, many of whom come from very different backgrounds, and in some cases, it would seem, planets, from my own. Words such as "dawg" or "whucho" emerge, sometimes having very different meanings from the words or phrases they resemble.
It makes me think that if I were to be dropped (rather unexpectedly, I would assume) one hundred years in the future, I would have an exceedingly difficult time figuring out what the people around me were saying, even if they were speaking this future equivalent of English. No doubt they would talk about playing "gawlf" and employ noises like "izzle" and not know how to use the subjunctive tense, though that last point isn't so much futuristic as a trait of the typical modern English-speaker. Literacy would be a thing of the past. Punctuation and capitalization would be crimes (CAPITAL crimes). Ralph Nader would still be running for President, because he is clearly some sort of love- and solar-powered eco-robot. The actual Presidency, of course, would be held by squid people. The national slogan would be "whucho gawlf handicap, dawg?"
Yeah, that's pretty much all I've got for now.
Posted at 08:10 pm by Saladin
 | | | RaccoonBacon
October 14, 2005 07:07 AM PDT
Ok, I'm done now, I promise. I have a friend who communicates like that, only it's with a delightfully fresh sense of irony. We use terms like "phat lewts" and then snicker. | |
| | | RaccoonBacon
October 14, 2005 07:06 AM PDT
You roxor!!!111oneone | |
| | | Lilith.
October 13, 2005 08:18 PM PDT
Once, I had a friend who said "OMG" constantly.
It was a mercy killing. | |
| | | Alyred
October 13, 2005 11:34 AM PDT
This is one of my pet peeves as well. Especially the whole "loose-lose" issue.
I've actually seen this on BUSINESS paraphernalia. It's sad how people don't know there's different spellings for different contexts of the same sound.
I *do* find it interesting, however, that while the uneducated masses agonize over the proper spellings/meanings of words in your woefully-underfunded and mismanaged public schools, they are willing to formalize and homogenize many acronyms amongst their distinct groups. Who doesn't know what "LOL" or "OMG" means? Vulgar as they feel on my tongue.
And Sal, I know you're not nearly as long-lived as I am, but you'll experience such change in your lifetime (assuming I don't manage to destroy you first). We are already going through it; however, it's less noticable because you are observing the change. Believe me, it's a pain in the ass to keep re-learning how the kids are talking these days, you niggardly old coot.
I swear to... well, ME... though, the first person that actually SAYS "LOL" to me in a verbal context will be vaporized. | |
| | | L7 I33t looser
October 13, 2005 11:17 AM PDT
OMG eye dint Vstand 1 ting u guyz r tawking about! wat is big deel?
muh gawlf handicap is 12, dawg! jeeah! eye new dere was a reezon i rawk so hard! | |
| | | thekaren
October 13, 2005 09:43 AM PDT
Just remember by then, "these ones" and "those ones" will not be redundant because "redundant" will have been entirely stripped from the language. Oh and "there," "their," and "they're" will probably have will switched to one form.
I'm guessing the confusion between "loose" and "lose" will still be an issue, though. | |
| | | atomicfreak
October 13, 2005 03:42 AM PDT
And you can go on and on and on and on and on and on and on....*fades in distance* | |
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