kane_magus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kane_magus) wrote2020-08-12 05:29 pm
kane_magus) wrote2020-08-12 05:29 pm
Entry tags:
"Periods. What Are They Good For."
(Note, the linked to post was not written by John Scalzi himself, but by his 20-something daughter, Athena.)
I find it very weird that kids today apparently perceive the use of correct grammar as being "angry" or "passive aggressive" or "hostile" or "petty" or whatever. Apparently, this has been a Thing™©® since at least 2013, and I never knew about it until now, as of reading the above linked post. How exceedingly strange. On the rare occasions that I find myself needing to text something to somebody (or back when I still used Twitter, before abandoning that trashfire of a website), I still use commas and periods and such. If that makes me seem "angry" or whatever, then oh fucking well, I guess. I'd rather appear "angry" than "illiterate." I goddamn loathe seeing texts (or tweets or comments or forum posts or whatever) that are just huge, multi-line blocks of text containing no punctuation. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I won't even read it, even if it may have been something that I might have otherwise agreed with or liked. To me, it is the lack of proper punctuation that I perceive as being "petty" or "hostile" or whatever. Or, at the very least, I perceive it as being very lazy. It's like, well, if you didn't care enough about what you wrote to bother with properly punctuating it, then I suppose that I likewise can't care enough about what you wrote to bother with reading it, either. *shrug*
Also, tangentially related to the above, far too many people these days mistakenly believe that "lol" is a proper substitution for a period, as I've already noted elsewhere and elsewhen. That whole phenomenon has only gotten abjectly worse in the past decade since I wrote that, I've noticed.
With all of that said, though, I guess I can kind of see where this mindset is coming from. I mean, when I speak out loud, especially to just family members or whatever, I'll say shit that I'd almost never use in writing (unless I'm being facetious or mocking or whatever), like "ain't" or "ya'll" or any of the hundreds of other malformed Southern Things™©® of legend and myth that those of us who live here tend to say on a daily basis. It just feels wrong to not say "ain't" instead of "isn't" or "aren't" or whatever, and anyone who uses actual, proper English in informal conversation in The South™©® just sounds like they're trying to put on airs or whatever. But with that said, if I somehow found myself in the presence of, say, Barack Obama or Bill Gates or John Scalzi or someone famous like that, I'd be doing my level best to enunciate properly and avoid all the Southernisms as best as I possibly could. And I do the same thing when writing, most of the time. (Though I note that I do tend to write "or whatever" way too much, even so.)
I find it very weird that kids today apparently perceive the use of correct grammar as being "angry" or "passive aggressive" or "hostile" or "petty" or whatever. Apparently, this has been a Thing™©® since at least 2013, and I never knew about it until now, as of reading the above linked post. How exceedingly strange. On the rare occasions that I find myself needing to text something to somebody (or back when I still used Twitter, before abandoning that trashfire of a website), I still use commas and periods and such. If that makes me seem "angry" or whatever, then oh fucking well, I guess. I'd rather appear "angry" than "illiterate." I goddamn loathe seeing texts (or tweets or comments or forum posts or whatever) that are just huge, multi-line blocks of text containing no punctuation. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I won't even read it, even if it may have been something that I might have otherwise agreed with or liked. To me, it is the lack of proper punctuation that I perceive as being "petty" or "hostile" or whatever. Or, at the very least, I perceive it as being very lazy. It's like, well, if you didn't care enough about what you wrote to bother with properly punctuating it, then I suppose that I likewise can't care enough about what you wrote to bother with reading it, either. *shrug*
Also, tangentially related to the above, far too many people these days mistakenly believe that "lol" is a proper substitution for a period, as I've already noted elsewhere and elsewhen. That whole phenomenon has only gotten abjectly worse in the past decade since I wrote that, I've noticed.
With all of that said, though, I guess I can kind of see where this mindset is coming from. I mean, when I speak out loud, especially to just family members or whatever, I'll say shit that I'd almost never use in writing (unless I'm being facetious or mocking or whatever), like "ain't" or "ya'll" or any of the hundreds of other malformed Southern Things™©® of legend and myth that those of us who live here tend to say on a daily basis. It just feels wrong to not say "ain't" instead of "isn't" or "aren't" or whatever, and anyone who uses actual, proper English in informal conversation in The South™©® just sounds like they're trying to put on airs or whatever. But with that said, if I somehow found myself in the presence of, say, Barack Obama or Bill Gates or John Scalzi or someone famous like that, I'd be doing my level best to enunciate properly and avoid all the Southernisms as best as I possibly could. And I do the same thing when writing, most of the time. (Though I note that I do tend to write "or whatever" way too much, even so.)