Firm closing

[Roxanne]

13 hours ago, Kopek said:

Sentence structure and grammar not taught in schools now?

Says he who uses ten exclamation marks when grammatically, only one is required.

Kopec,, I have to regularly put your posts through a decipher meter. I can't believe you're complaining about the use of the very occasional acronym. 

 

[Roger Mexico]

10 hours ago, Kopek said:

Seriously, what is the point of a secret   languish ( sic) that people have to spend 'their' time interpreting?

Speak English, it.s so easy if you went to school!!! Isn't it???

You're actually confusing two different things.  Secret languages, argots etc (Cockney rhyming slang, Shelta and so on) are meant to disguise what they are talking about from outsiders and mark their users as insiders. So they are meant to be hard to understand and obscure.  Of course as 'secrets' usually leak out, they may  become more widely known or even studied and just end up colourful linguistic decoration (as with rhyming slang).  Alternatively they may continually change to maintain privacy (as with Shelta or teenage slang).

But the sort of abbreviations that TVOR was complaining about are different.  They're simply meant to save time and space by replacing common phrases with letters and are assumed to widely-known.  So complaining about their use is like complaining about someone using a word you don't know.  The response is going to that you should look them up in a dictionary - as indeed happened.  You can't spend your life going around demanding that everyone else in the universe dumbs down to your own level of ignorance.  Not least because they don't know what the contents of your head are.

Of course in particular situations it may still turn out that a word or abbreviation is still obscure or ambiguous and people are entitled to ask for detailed clarification.  But "How dare you use a word I don't know" when on the internet isn't a good look, especially when it is usually so easy to discover what it does mean.

[Roxanne]

I’m full of warm fuzzies now. 

[The Voice of Reason]

28 minutes ago, Roxanne said:

If you read a post and come across a word that you don't know the meaning of, what do you do?

You look it up.

Why?

So you can educate yourself.

You're saying @VOICE OF REASON that I'm disrespectful because I post an acronym that you don't understand? What about if I post a word you don't understand. Is that also disrespectful?

Seriously, you old buggers are the worst.

No it’s entirely different. Acronyms are not words. Apart from those say, representing an organisation or title (RAC, CEO etc) it’s really just laziness to quote a phrase by the first letter of its constituent words (IIRC,etc). In a few certain circumstances where the acronym is very well known and has fallen into common usage,  eg FYI, that may be deemed acceptable.

But as can be seen from your Urban Dictionary,  “FTW” has been ascribed several different meanings, rendering it almost useless as an acronym.

You young un’s eh?

[kevster]

28 minutes ago, Roxanne said:

I’m full of warm fuzzies now. 

And you’ve only just had it swept 

[The Voice of Reason]

1 hour ago, Roger Mexico said:.

But the sort of abbreviations that TVOR was complaining about are different.  They're simply meant to save time and space by replacing common phrases with letters and are assumed to widely-known.  So complaining about their use is like complaining about someone using a word you don't know.  The response is going to that you should look them up in a dictionary - as indeed happened.  You can't spend your life going around demanding that everyone else in the universe dumbs down to your own level of ignorance.  Not least because they don't know what the contents of your head are.

 

Roger 

I would suggest that the indiscriminate use of acronyms, not widely recognized is the real dumbing down here.

I would certainly never complain about someone using a word I don’t know. Rox is right I would look it up to educate myself. But not what looks like alphabet spaghetti. 
 

Plus of course there are the ambiguities that this can lead to “LOL” means “lots of love” to some, “  “laugh out loud” to others. It could also mean things like “ let otters live”. 
 

Such ambiguity does not, or rarely does, occur with words. That’s the difference.
 

[WTF]

11 minutes ago, The Voice of Reason said:

Roger 

I would suggest that the indiscriminate use of acronyms, not widely recognized is the real dumbing down here.

I would certainly never complain about someone using a word I don’t know. Rox is right I would look it up to educate myself. But not what looks like alphabet spaghetti. 
 

Plus of course there are the ambiguities that this can lead to “LOL” means “lots of love” to some, “  “laugh out loud” to others. It could also mean things like “ let otters live”. 
 

Such ambiguity does not, or rarely does, occur with words. That’s the difference.
 

otters ??? is someone trying to get otters culled ?

[La Colombe]

1 hour ago, Roger Mexico said:

Not least because they don't know what the contents of your head are.

I could hazard a guess. 

[The Voice of Reason]

6 minutes ago, WTF said:

otters ??? is someone trying to get otters culled ?

This is exactly the sort of confusion created by the overuse of acronyms.

Which could be avoided with the use of proper words.

[Gladys]

10 minutes ago, The Voice of Reason said:

This is exactly the sort of confusion created by the overuse of acronyms.

Which could be avoided with the use of proper words.

It is pretty unequivocal that it means 'laugh,  or laughing, out loud'.  If you don’t know just Google, easy. 

There are lots of acronyms or abbreviated phrases which were in use long before the Internet- ASAP, FYI, RSVP, PDQ, AKA, AWOL, spring to mind.

[John Wright]

1 hour ago, The Voice of Reason said:

No it’s entirely different. Acronyms are not words. Apart from those say, representing an organisation or title (RAC, CEO etc) it’s really just laziness to quote a phrase by the first letter of its constituent words (IIRC,etc). In a few certain circumstances where the acronym is very well known and has fallen into common usage,  eg FYI, that may be deemed acceptable.

But as can be seen from your Urban Dictionary,  “FTW” has been ascribed several different meanings, rendering it almost useless as an acronym.

You young un’s eh?

To some extent the use of acronyms for text, messaging and forum use is generational and non use and refusal to learn is tending to gammon.

From long experience of experts ( especially medical ) and government reports and court pleadings I take the stance that they’re acceptable, but never assume your audience will understand, always define in your first usage in any document or post.

That being said, VoR, it’s probably a safe bet that you use all sorts of abbreviations, contractions etc in real life speech and writing.

[The Voice of Reason]

7 minutes ago, John Wright said:

That being said, VoR, it’s probably a safe bet that you use all sorts of abbreviations, contractions etc in real life speech and writing.

Yes I do , whilst ensuring my meaning is clear to my audience.

[John Wright]

1 minute ago, The Voice of Reason said:

ensuring my meaning is clear to my audience.

That’s an assumption that it is unsafe to make.

For instance, contractions using an an apostrophe for missing letters, or to indicate the possessive, are problematic for many native, and most non native, users of English.

[Jarndyce]

40 minutes ago, WTF said:

otters ??? is someone trying to get otters culled ?

Will no-one think of the otters??!?!

[CrazyDave]

31 minutes ago, The Voice of Reason said:

This is exactly the sort of confusion created by the overuse of acronyms.

Which could be avoided with the use of proper words.

I don’t think anyone else was confused TBH.

HTH