Arrrggh!!!!!!

I'd forgotten that if you edit a post with a poll in it, the poll goes away. Damn. Twenty people had already responded. I am going to repost the post:

tenacious_snail lent me Lynne Truss's book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. (My favorite quote so far: "Sticklers, unite! You have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion, and arguably you didn't have much of that to begin with.")

So, herewith a poll.

[Poll #435844]

I refuse to do a "clicky thing": this poll is enough of a piece of fluff as it is, and the trend has gotten out of hand, anyway.

By the way, I realize that, given the nature of the poll, I am bound to have made grammatical and spelling mistakes in this post. C'est la vie.

[Edit: it has been pointed out to me that I have omitted at least two punctuation marks: the ellipsis (...) and parentheses. It also occurs to me now that I have left out the hyphen, dash, tilde, and quotation marks, both single and double. My apologies to the partisans of these wonderful pieces of lexigraphical art.]

More thoughts on language

I her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss discusses, mostly despairingly, the impact of electronic communication on punctuation. (She does not like emoticons, oh no she doesn't, my precioussss....) She talks about the use of asterisks (and bracketing underlines) for emphasis, but ignores what is to me the most interesting electronic punctuation: the "movement" asterisk.

You've seen them -- the single or double asterisks denoting physical action: **shudder**, *grin*, *walks away humming tunelessly*, that sort of thing. (I have also seen -- and used -- multiple colons for the same effect: :::looks around nervously:::. (And let's not even get into () or {} for hugs, shall we?)) I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with them; I use them myself.

But I think it sheds a fascinating light on the nature of electronic communication. Truss cites linguists who talk of email and netspeak as being a hybrid of written and spoken language. And I think that's true, but it also strikes me as something more subtle: perhaps we are stage-managing our communications with others.

The movement asterisks seem to me as being equivalent to stage directions in plays, except that they are descriptive rather than prescriptive. What is the difference between *gasps in horror* and [GASPS IN HORROR] ? Nothing much, except that one describes an action that has taken (or is taking) place, while the second indicates an action that should take place. Emoticons function similarly.

Or maybe it is not like stage directions at all; maybe it is more closely related to close-captioning of television programs. In either case, is there some sort of philosophical issue here? Do we somehow subconsciously see our lives as entertainment programs, with ourselves as the stars? If so, how does that impact what we want from/seek out in/think about the world? Does it make us more drama-prone in our communication or in life generally?

Probably, it is something much simpler. After all, I can't conceive of sending a three sentence personal letter. (Business letters are another matter entirely.) But I often send emails with only a few sentences -- sometimes only one. Irony and sarcasm usually take more than a few words to develop properly in a written medium; perhaps emoticons et al. help overcome the lack of verbiage.

(There is another netspeak punctuation that I find interesting: the use or "< >" and "</>" to indicate irony or sarcasm or the like. I'm still trying to make some philosophical sense of it.)

I think differences in fora are also interesting. I do not have a lot of experience with Usenets boards, but a cursory examination of the one I do frequent shows (among posts by regulars, at least) a near absence of emoticons or movement asterisks. It has always struck me as more "formal" than LJ. And again, context matters a great deal: a thread of people discussing a social event is much more likely to have emoticons than one discussing, to take a recent example, the ways in which Usenet communications are impacted by LJ.

I know I am not covering new ground with this. I'm sure many a Ph.D. in linguistics has worked on this, or similar issues, for their dissertation. But it's still interesting to to me.

[Edit: on further reflection, this post strikes me as, ahem, pretentious. (No, moi pretentious? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you!) But I still think it would be interesting to discuss electronic punctuation and the way it arises out of the nature of the medium.]

We are seriously annoyed.

The LJ memories feature has been broken for at least 24 hours now. Memories is where I store all my recipes. I need to go back and move them somewhere else, but until its fixed I'm stuck.

[Edit: fortunately I remembered what month I recorded the recipe I was interested in, so I was lucky. But most of the others I would have no idea.]

Truffles, 1/23/03
Brownies 11/30/02
Pumpkin Bread 12/13/02
White Peach Cobbler and Ordination Truffle Cake 9/3/02

Okay, those are the important ones not to lose.