The New Language
“Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.” – Carl Sandburg
Daily doodling. — without typos. — Illustration by Pat Bean
I’m Belly-Laughing, Not LOLing
I must admit that the texting- twittering new language often leaves me befuddled. I mean take LOL, which I assume means laughing-out-loud and is the easiest of the acronym-craze to understand .But LOL could mean many other things, like living out loud, loving only lions, or liars often lie.
I would much rather be birding here than proofreading. Wouldn’t you?
OK! I’m being facetious. But then I just had this conversation, over coffee with a friend who is outraged about all the grammatical mistakes and typos found in today’s printed words, so much so that she can’t continue reading when she comes across a misused word.
Thankfully, she doesn’t own a computer, because when I reread my own posted blog, I often discover one or more of those overlooked verbiage gremlins. Like the rest of the writing world, I need a proofreader, a career that mostly disappeared with the ascension of technology. These days, writers have to be their own proofreaders.
Since I read for content, I can easily overlook an occasional grammatical error, well unless they’re many and truly a sign of sloppiness. Good writing is what is important to me.
Meanwhile, I’m currently trying to catch all those misused-misspelled-typo gremlins in my recently finished book, “Travels with Maggie,” before it gets published. I don’t want someone to stop reading because they found a grammatical error or a typo. It’s very hard work for someone who is a writer — and not a proof reader.
Oh, by the way, I never use LOL when I really mean belly laughing. I guess that’s because my brain was formed long before the days of texting and twittering.
The Wondering-Wanderer’s blog pick of the day.
Bean’s Pat: Interesting Literature http://tinyurl.com/nhhsob4 Just because it’s April Fool’s Day
Pat Bean's blog 
one of the fun things about online communication is that accepted grammar went out with the postage stamp. you can write with no caps for instance. you can use tools and edit your stuff to look perfect, or you can type as fast as lightening, make up words (i so love this!), bastardize punctuation, and say stuff like prolly instead of probably, or meh, to mean well…….meh!
it is sort of half way between speaking and writing. i so love this.
of course maybe this comment is just my excuse for being too lazy to use tools to edit or, perish the thought, re-read my own stuff. plus i love typing and thinking really fast and i can so do that online as i am with this comment, you have prolly noticed.
i am a happy member of the online grammar criminals….and I was a straight a psych and eng lit major once in a galaxy far, far away…..
take that you profs that made me diagram sentences!
that turned out to be about as useful in my daily life as trigonometry!
I think I fall somewhere in between Cindy. I do love the quickness that writing on a computer offers when my brain is racing with ideas, and I’ve always been more about content and communicating than grammatical perfection. As an editor, before spell check, I always said the best reporter in the house was the worse speller. He did, however, learn to use the spell check when it became available.
Such a beautiful drawing Pat.
It is difficult to get to know all the acronyms these days – sometimes I need to ask my children to translate for me 🙂 I think that in the future people who write grammatically correct will become an oddity.
Thanks Colline.
I’m definitely of the thought that if you’re going to do something, you best do it right. This is especially true of writing. Nothing makes me cringe more than finding mistakes in my own work, and I inevitably (always!) find mistakes.
While I would never be so rude as to correct friends in text messaging, I find some shortcuts to be little more than laziness. I have a friend who actually texts the word ‘2day’, and kudos to her for saving one entire keystroke, however I can’t read it without wondering if I somehow mistakenly received a message from a 14 year old as opposed to a 40something year old woman. 😉
Congratulations on finishing Travels with Maggie! How completely exciting!
Thanks Alex. I guess you and I will be fighting those writing mistake gremlins until the day we die. The nasty little critters chase our words around everywhere.