semach.the.monkey wrote:
>
> The deliberate misspelling of perfectly good words, however, is quite
> simply insulting. Ok, it's cute and funny on icanhascheezburger.com,
> but on a forum where people are trying to communicate sensible
> information it is an insult to the intelligence of other readers to
> have to put up with crap like this.
>
"David Foster Wallace" wrote:
>
> [W]e SNOOTS know when and how to hyphenate phrasal adjectives and to
> keep participles from dangling, and we know that we know, and we know
> how very few other Americans know this stuff or even care, and we judge
> them accordingly.
>
> In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable about, SNOOTs' attitudes
> about contem****ary usage resemble religious/political conservatives'
> attitudes about contem****ary culture: We combine a missionary zeal and
> a near-neural faith in our beliefs' im****tance with a curmudgeonly
> hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely manhandled
> and corrupted by supposedly literate adults. Plus a dash of the elitism
> of, say, Billy Zane in Titanic--a fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that
> listening to most people's public English feels like watching somebody
> use a Stradivarius to pound nails. We are the Few, the Proud, the More
> or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else.
>
> --excerpted From "'Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage'
> (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2001/04/0070913),"
David Foster
> Wallace, Harper's Magazine, April 2001
>
Wallace goes on to note that we all have multiple language dialects
that we ****ft between more or less effortlessly. Dialect is used as a
primary way to identify members of a tribe or peer group; the reason
SNOOTs repeatedly got the crap beat out of them on the playground is
that, by trying to smugly enforce the rules of the Standard Written
English dialect, they became identified with The
Establishment--teachers, parents, and everyone else who kids have to
rebel against. In a way, such SNOOTs are as language-deficient as the
kids who can't tell their they'res from their theirs; they can
communicate in Standard Written English, but not in the dialect of the
playground.
Similarly, the visceral reaction to LOLcat dialect (which I understand
and share) is basically a reaction to hearing the dialect of another
tribe; a tribe to which we do not belong.
--
tholub
------------------------------------------------------------------------
tholub's Profile: http://www.unicyclist.com/profile/804
View this thread: http://www.unicyclist.com/thread/70089
Posted Via Usenet.com Premium Usenet Newsgroup Services
----------------------------------------------------------
http://www.usenet.com
|
