Andrew said:
Alex said:
Andrew said:
Thomas Kellerer wrote:
Alex Hunsley wrote on 16.04.2006 10:27:
Yes, I knew what you meant. However, here are four reasons you
should use English in this group:
[skipped a lot of good reasons why to use proper english in a posting]
5) it's the minimum politeness one can ask for!
I usually don't even bother to answer if a posting is written in
poor english. Please note that poor english stemming from a
non-native speaker is something different and can easily be
identified as such. But simple laziness is extremely impolite IMHO.
You wouldn't bother to speak to someone who does not even try to
utter complete words, wouldn't you?
Thomas
and yet you used 'IMHO'
go figure...
IMHO and related items are acronyms, as opposed to lazy mispellings of
words like 'ur'.
sure...
and words like 'ur' are abbreviations.
Yeah, sure are. I personally find such an abbreviation of such a common
and short word annoying.
Both are perfectly legal English language constructs.
And the same can b said about abbreviations.
I agree that it sounds daft at first that people moan about 'ur' but not
about IMHO etc, but I suppose it comes down to the fact that 'b', 'ur'
etc. aren't in standard usenet usage (in certain groups). And typing
IMHO, a common (and polite) sentiment saves a decent bit of typing,
whereas 'b' versus 'be' is not really worth the slower reading time and
possible confusion.
Seeing 'b' and 'ur' etc. in posts increases the cognitive load of the
reader. It's harder to read, so less people will be bothered to read the
post. So less help for the original poster, whereas things like IMHO are
infrequent enough and well accepted/recognised that they usually don't
tend to turn people off reading posts.
Also consider the confusion for non-native English speakers when
encountering such terms as 'ur' littering even the shortest post. (Of
course, if more people used 'ur' etc. then it would become standard and
well understood usage, but we aren't there yet...)
The beauty of Abbreviations is that their true meaning can often be
discovered by the context or even their placement within the sentence.
This allows us to create nu 1s on the fly.
But they increase cognitive load ( == annoying) and cause difficulty to
non-native English users of the groups.
Out of interest: why don't I see you using text-style writing in your posts?
Acronyms however, don't support this.
Actually, in defense of acronyms, a few times I've encountered a new
one, and pretty quickly realised what it meant, given the context. And
the common acronyms are useful /exactly because/ people usually don't
just make new ones up on the spot, and used well known ones - hence
they're not a big obstacle to understanding, once you know the common
ones like FWIW, IM(H)O, BTW, and so on.
Something that makes me smile...
'GSM SMS messages'
or expanded to its proper form because acronyms are lazy....
'Global System for Mobile communication Simple Messaging System messages'
Both are such a 'mouthful' that they have been shortened to :
Text Message
Texts
txts
(and others)
The text part is funny - as its implied in the SMS part of the sentence
above. But because technology moved on and we got MultiMedia Messaging,
we introduced the 'text' to differentiate.
Ah, the wonders of acronym history!
Have you come across 'SMS slang'? Where people say 'book' instead of
'cool', because a mobile phone with auto complete comes up with 'book'
as the first guess when you try to type 'cool'....