Re: inchoate
firstname lastname (greenlight55@hotmail.com)
Mon, 08 Mar 1999 07:01:29 -0800 (PST)
i have a feeling that this was brought on by me, so i figured i should
respond to it.
> OK, so I'm obsessional about it. But do the people
> who send in posts devoid of capitals give *any* thought
> to the way their posts will be received by their readers?
wow, scottie. or shall i say...Wow, Scottie. Did someone forget his
bran flakes today?
> To write a sentence in remorselessly lower case - often even
> without punctuation - means that the reader has first to
> *decipher* the message before starting to try & understand
> it. This is fine practice for those of us in military
intelligence
> who wish to keep our decrypting faculties sharpened but
> for the ordinary reader it simply presents one more hurdle
> on the road to clarity.
Well i suppose that if periods and commas aren't enough for you, and
perhaps you're not referring only to me here, then it would cut down on
clarity. But is the big letter at the beginning that much of a signpost
for you when it is always always preceded by a period?
> There's also the implication that the writer is doing us all
> a great favour, that his heavily veiled thoughts are sufficient
> in themselves, that no further effort is required from him.
> Or perhaps that his teenshy weenshy, babyish,
> thumb-in-the-mouth mannerisms are too loveable to be
> resisted.
Now here's where you get personal. And maybe a little bit laughably
determined yourself. I'll agree with you that people like "kd lang" and
writers whose names are something like "maryellen spiritus jenkins" are
laughable for their self-unimportance, but lets's face it...e-mail
writing is not printing up an album cover or presenting a academic
essay/work of art to the general public. Do you actually read your
email as a conscious literary venture? People who write e-mail with
that intent, maybe padding the vault of sent letters for a possible
publication after their first two best selling novels, need to rethink
themselves. Isn't e-mail functional rather than intentioned and
scrutinized over? I know i rarely go back to change a word if it makes
sense.
And here I'll stop assuming that you were referring to me, because if
sentences such as "pretty sure it stands for Army Post Office." strike
you as heavily veiled, I wonder how you get through any of Salinger's
work. Oh, and as for my "firstname lastname" up there, it's supposed to
be Grover Douregis, and the victim of forgetting to change those two
boxes at some registration point along the line. If that oversight
strikes you as a little babyish, and too eggregiously unprofessional for
the bananafish mailing list...
> Well huck you, sunshine. If you're not going to do your best,
> neither am I.
well so be it, and huck (ooh..clever) you too. But you have to
consider, perhaps I'm making some grand statement of namelessness and
under-capitalization that speaks volumes about the human
cyber-condition, but more likely I figured that a few periods and
commas would be enough for the great intellectual multitudes to
understand what I'm saying, and that it's stange that this needs to be
addressed in the first place. Maybe I'm wrong here, so every post from
here on in will have a shiny tall capital letter heralding the beginning
of every brand new sentence or name. So keep a lookout, Scottie, and
you're bound to be pleased.
Grover
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