kasia in a nutshell

I personally agree with the camp saying that you should type it out and the abbreviations look like crap. However I do like using them to express emotion. Although that's something that I would never do on a school paper...

I dunno. The whole issues sounds kinda gay.

a-men

i hate the use of "LOL" (notice quotation marks!!) OI!

OMG! LOL! U hit d nail on d head. U r sooooo l33t kasia.

Sorry. Feel free smack me at any point :)

Making mental note not to use LOL when IMing with Kasia, then rolls eyes and walks away.

However, I do cringe when the spoken word is pulverized. "I don't got it", "I brung it wit me" "Nuttin'" are a few phrases I despise.

I have never understood why people have told me to "bring it inside" when it's been so obvious that I was inside, and they've meant for me so take something into another room. "Bring it upstairs" - what's with this "bring", I bring it to you, but take it someplace else, that's the way I learned it my English Language class.

Sorry a tad off topic, but an opportunity to moan.

I hate it when people can't get punctuation right.

Why be so damn stingy on the ellipsis? Use the third dot

Here's a link to Least Used Chat E-Bbreviations I once saw on Satirewire.com.

Enjoy!

I heard someone say print(ing presses) freeze(s) language.

The language of the year 1300 was barely comprehensible to

those alive in 1400, and yet we, 500 years later, can read and

understand what was written in the year 1500. I heard someone

else say (well, I probably read it) that our modern, 'frozen'

language sounds stuffy and archaic, full as it is of

constructions and conventions that have little to do with what

people are actually experiencing, and everything to do with

what happened to become embedded in the icy matrix at the

moment language froze.

Think, in the Bay Area, where I live, 200 years ago the people

on one side of the Bay could not understand people on the

other. Within 100 miles there were dozens of dialects. In the

Niger Delta there are some 200 dialects/languages.

Look at a map of the US, from the Mississippi east that shows

counties: why are they all 15 miles from edge to center? Why

such uniformity, regularity in the areal layout of governing

units, why that particular scale? 15 miles is a days walk,

and this was the scope of 95% of the population's existence.

In 1776, Philadelphia had 50,000 inhabitants. 95% of the

seaboard's population were subsistence farmers whose economic

and cultural destinies had nothing to do with anything more

than a days walk distant. It took weeks to cross the

Atlantic, a distance of a few thousand miles. It could take

weeks to get from New York to Boston, too. It was easier for

Bostonians to talk to London than to Charleston. Isolation

bred accent, dialect, patois, language. Print was only

beginning to fix it into one shape.

Fantastic linguistic and cultural diversity was the rule for

the millenia that preceded the last few hundred years.

Shakespeare happened to be around when the ice was just

setting, and he, like the people around him, was more

accustomed to an atmosphere where invention in daily speech

was the rule.

Now, late in the industrial era, we live in the time of

wholesale death of languages. In One River Wade Davis says

"At one time there were thousands of cultures around the world

and probably as many as fifteen thousand languages, each like

a flash of the human spirit. Today perhaps six thousand are

still spoken...'More than half are gone,' I said. 'In a

century only a few hundred will remain, a few hundred out of

thousands.'"

The web is a new chapter -- the capital intensive,

broadcast-oriented, highly centralized, copy-right,

juridically oriented form of captalism that has prevailed

since the mid 15th century is transmogrifying. Who knows what

things will look like in 50 or 100 years.

One favorite anecdote that I like to keep in mind is:

Gutenburg's press was repossessed. It almost makes me weep

with laughter.

I think these lyrics from David Byrnes' album, The Forest, say

it better than all of the words I might utter on the topic.

They just make me smile a quiet smile for the wisdom they

contain about change, and the human place in the world, and

about human hubris. After all, what is the glory of language

idolized but the amber in which petrified ego is ensnared?

Byrne:

Mai lajf is bjutifull
Mai Bet soft and Worm
Wejk ap mai lidle lembs
Sun yt uyl bi daun.

Oll sings, ar wondefull
Houm is neva far
Your Poppa hyrs ju nau.
Aj hijr hym krain.
Uan end Tu end Sfri and vor

Hoold on Tajt end dount let gou.

Stiks end stouns uil brejk
jour bouns.
God hes left as on aur oun.

Uan and Tu end Sfri end vor
Aj dont keer end dont nou.
Hold on tajt end dount let
gou.

i am studying the power of language. any help would be gratefully accepted.

Hey totally understand what you are saying, as a student of linguistics. This however just a natural progression. We are a hightech society and time is our most valuable asset.

Hey totally understand what you are saying, as a student of linguistics. This however just a natural progression. We are a hightech society and time is our most valuable asset.