Punctuation (Page 3 of 12)

c u l8r   -- I've heard these SMS abbreviations referred to as Punk'tuation

Sorry, Draußen vor der Tür  is by Borchert.  "A play that no theatre wants to perform and no audience wants to see."

The good news is that it looks to be a passing fad. It harks from the initial SMS text messaging arrangement from a cell-phone where the numeric keypad doubled up as alpha keys. Press the number 4 key once for 4, twice for the letter G, three times for the letter H and four presses for the letter I. Similarly the number 6 key is pressed once for 6, twice for M, thrice for N and four time for O... and so on.

Users (especially the young) rapidly became very proficient at typing with both thumbs flashing simultaneously. Naturally that font of resourcefulness, the human mind, looked for shortcuts to this labour in the form of abbreviations. It was an era when text messages cost a fee to send, phone memory buffers were small and long message would need to sent in several sections. Again abbreviation was desirable in order to compress the message into a single 'text' and therefore minimise the fee.

I was split. Whilst I found the bastardisation of the language and the disregard for grammar quite offensive I was amazed at the mind/eye/thumb dexterity of my kids and found myself grudgingly admiring the inventiveness and resourcefulness of these acronym/abbreviation codes.

However, enter the 'Smartphone' and 'tablets' with their large display and QWERTY touch-screen keys and the pre-emptive/predictive text systems (the words are spelled out in full, automatically spell-checked and punctuation is automatically added by the system). With most of the new systems if you type 'l8r' into the phone, an automatic conversion is applied and the word 'later' will appear in the text document.  For the most part, text messaging is either cheaper or 'free' or up to limit included within a contract. Also the size of message is much less an issue with larger sized text massages allowed by the carriers and the phone memory buffers. Nowadays my children often dictate a message to their phone and the voice recognition system creates the (punctuated and spell-checked) text message for them.         

This has led to the Punkuation phenomena fading away. Like morse-code or semaphore, people simply don't need to do it anymore. Some remnants will remain as nostalgia for those who used it, but the actual necessity or incentives to abbreviate have disappeared and thus the drivers for its use.

Added: Oh, and the advent instant video messaging on mobile phones, the likes of Skype and Facetime further diminish the old ways of SMS texting.

Other than possibly leant, what do you suppose that I think needs deciphering? The without ... within ?  There is neither there a case of mistaking the words for prepositions missing objects nor ending with a preposition. And, interestingly, the second without could be mistaken for a forlorn preposition and not make a bit of difference.

Moreover, I would never point to two Irish English-language experimenters, perhaps from a natural disliking for the English, Joyce and Becket, as authors who wrote in standard English. That does make make standard English, whose existence you deny, disappear from everyone else's universe.

¿With the limitations on the number of characters for a tweet, it would seem to me that there is still great value in having a good vocabulary for Punkuation? Is tweeting dying?

Also, is there no longer a demand, among those who communicate with text messages, for a language that will send a large message on a small screen?

Memphis Trace

The truth is, I don't know.

The fact is that the cell-phone with the numeric key and the underlying trio of Alpha characters as a text messaging device is all but dead. The small capacity character limit for SMS messages has gone too. These were the primary drivers for the abbreviation/acronym phenomena.

I'm sure some tweeters will decide to abbreviate whilst using a QWERTY keyboard; they might countermand the auto-replace and auto-pre-emptive text and auto spell check features to allow the code strings, but punkuation has become a minority style choice rather than a practice of habit driven by operational necessity upon the handheld media devices of the masses.

What I do know for a fact is that the people I witnessed doing it, are doing it less or no longer. They don't need to.  Also, within the Twitter feeds that I follow, these abbreviation codes are quite rare. People tend to use actual words. You might get the odd 'LOL' or 'WTF' but for the most part, I think they want their 128 words to be legible and have meaning and impact. You don't get that when you publish the esoteric character strings that people (judgemental as we are) tend to associate with adolescent, uncouth, ill educated and vulgar culture.

As far as I'm aware, Twitter is a broadcast medium rather than a private chatter system.  If you are going to give the world the benefit of your worded wisdom are you really going to interleave your prose with the likes of 'FCO' 'INUCOSM' '2moro'  '2nite' '@TEOTD'  'gratz'
LOL!

As far as I'm concerned, the root form of 'twitter' is 'twit'.

Reminds me of back in the 70's or 80's when a lot of young people went around in blue jeans labelled to indicate that they had an ache in their jord.  I never did find out where the jord is, and I doubt anyone remembers jord-ache jeans anymore.  Maybe they treat it with ibuprofen now.

Inept, no doubt, to a reader bent on ignoring the context in which the sentence is written. To any reader with a sense for the language in context, it is efficient and elegant.

To say it is inept without showing it within the context written is what separates an eager grammarian from a James Joyce. All well and good unless you are a creative writer. Creative writers, by definition, dictate the evolution of the language. Grammarians, and linguists weenies, archive it.

Memphis Trace

Yes, yes. You're hell bent on leaving your ludicrous I'm just a hick deposits.

Inept according to whom, Javert?

I did go back and read everything you've said. It seems you're defending standard written English (fairly enough) but also (seem) to be insisting that punctuation and prepositions & such DEFINITELY SHOULD FOLLOW STANDARD RULES unless you have determined that they should not (such as your criticism of commas in Woolf.)

What I get out of this conversation is that you don't like Woolf because she uses commas correctly (in the passage Dill cited), you don't like "A woman without; her man is nothing" because it uses a semi-colon incorrectly, you don't like "hicks," you think the bulk of college students can't read, you think Twitter is stupid, you think that anyone who goes against "proper" English is stupid, and James Joyce would definitely be stupid if he used a semi-colon as showcased in "A woman without; her man is nothing," even though you concede that experimental work like that of Joyce (and Virginia Woolf) is in a whole different category from work which should follow standard written English (like school papers, newspaper articles, and novels which hope to sell.)

However, Joyce does it right, according to you, and Woolf does it wrong, and that has something to do with the fact that Virginia Woolf uses commas while James Joyce said YES. And also probably her husband took control of her writing & she just let that pass without argument, because that's what artists do. (Please pause while I roll my eyes.)

Are you talking about the passage I quoted for Dill above? That was VW. Mrs. Dalloway. Pure poetry.

Efficiency belongs to newspapers.

You seem like you've got your trusty book of laws next to you, and you can allow for some deviations, but ONLY IF THEY MAKE SENSE. Fine art often makes no sense at all, which is why it makes all the sense in the world.

I'm not knocking standard written English. I try to tuck in my prepositions like a law-abiding fellow. I don't know why. I think it's a silly archaic rule left over from the 1600s, but I still suffer spasms of shame if I leave a "to" at the end of a sentence. Even verbally. I'll tangle myself up in a simple remark trying to tuck in my preposition.

But art? It manipulates language to create jarring effects to a purpose, and that purpose isn't always obvious. Redundancy? Underlines a moment. Hammers it into the unconscious. Destroys complacency.

The standard is the thing against which many artists work. The standard can make a tale palatable to those who want the language to hide. But for some artists, the language is the adventure. They take what is standard & push against it. The ambiguity you dislike in the line Memphis defends is often what is incredible in art, and what a dull & "standard" world it would be if art was lost to the letter of the law.

Ezra Pound said, "Make it new." That means BREAK THE RULES. They did, and how. Why shouldn't any of us? Language for the artist of the early twentieth century -- the Joyces, the Hemingways, the Woolfs, the T. S. Eliots -- was a rebellion. A challenge. A revolution.

I looked up "without" as an adverb in the Oxford English Dictionary, & it is listed as archaic. Who cares, though? Archaic only means "not currently popular." As an artist, you have it within your power to make a vote on what is popular.

I propose that A woman without; her man is nothing is a line standing on its own within poetry. Whatever comes before or after the section will determine what the semicolon accomplishes.

A semicolon can be used to separate a series of items that are already separated by commas, or it can be used between parts of equal rank.  A woman without is a phrase; her man is nothing is a complete sentence.  A woman without; her man is nothing was composed by an inept author.

in the Oxford English Dictionary, without as an adverb listed as archaic

You don't get out in the real world much, do you? Just a wild guess on my part. Language, to include punctuation, is not set in concrete in a static world and that is especially true in a creative writing environment such as this site, and even more especially true when the matter under discussion derives from an obviously humorous presentation of the different ways to punctuate the same words, the whole intent being to produce a humorous result and not to stick to some misguided notion of what proper punctuation is or is not as espoused by a would-be punctuation guru. Yeah, I know, I just wasted my breath, or fingers, or whatever, lol. But it really is okay, fun even, to bend/break the so-called rules once in a while. Take care. Vern