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Post by ginny on Mar 4, 2021 18:44:50 GMT
I'm a shameless abuser of LOL, both in informal email/other digital communication, and analog letters. I rely on it to be a shorthand way of communicating when I'm being a bit cheeky or not very serious, which is often, in the absence of facial or vocal cues. It's interesting how varied different people's experiences/feelings about email can be, despite it being part of daily life for 20+ years for most of us. In analogue letters, I usually draw a smiley. LOL is OK for me in digital communication, but not in analogue letters.
Having said that, each to their own. It would be a boring old world if we all were the same.
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Post by radellaf on Mar 4, 2021 21:47:16 GMT
As for abbreviations / text speak... my all time favourite is 'KWIM'... an American penpal used this regularly in her communication. It took me ages to figure out it's supposed to mean 'know what I mean'. English / US text speak is a bit of a challenge for non-native-speakers. I do understand that it makes a lot of things easier in forums / mailing lists - things like 'TBH' (to be honest) or 'IMHO' (in my humble opinion) add some politeness, but you don't have to type out all the words...
If it is important, then for sure, the consequences of being extra polite are less severe than being too brusque. I'll apply that to a point. If someone is really going to deal with me differently because I didn't end my voicemail with "goodbye" then, well, I can probably do without that person. Especially in any extended interaction. If it's a one off thing to an authority (police, judge) then you really can't be too careful. Never seen KWIM. I see a LOT of new ones, lately, mostly TLA (three letter abbreviations, well, initialisms really). SMH for shaking my head, IKR for "I know, right" (from watching too much Friends?), HMU for hit me up. The old BBS and usenet era ones seem to be more often 4 letters. IMHO seems popular, although I see it misinterpreted as Honest Opinion, which is more like TBH, which I kinda don't like. _Humble_ seems more humble. My opinion - I might be wrong. _Honest_ seems to be saying that you think you're right and well informed, but what you think might be offensive. It's more humble to imply you could be wrong. I've run into too many people who don't know FWIW. That's just _too_ useful an expression, IMHO. I also don't understand why someone would reply "what's FWIW?" in this day and age. Back in the BBS/usenet era, you'd have to find a dictionary text file or somehow go to significant trouble. Now, just take less than a minute and type the darn thing into Google rather than wait for the other person to explain it to you. That way you feel smarter, and the other person less chagrinned. Or maybe I feel bad for being a (tech) dinosaur for using old initialisms. A weird one that I still find useful, but nobody seems to know, is TSIA. It may have been limited to the WWIV BBS people in the 1990s. "Title Says It All" I guess it should be SSIA, for an email. In WWIV the messages had a Title rather than a Subject. So you used it, instead of leaving the message empty (which the system may not have allowed), if all you needed was the title. I've recently seen some message system that used "NT" (No Text) for the same thing. TSIA is cuter. Also from those BBSes was TTFN (Ta Ta For Now). Also cute. The BBS days, generally, seemed to be more fun and care free than the web. Also, really limited, mostly to people who could call that phone number as a "local" number (20 mi radius or less). I guess now I'm just waxing nostalgic. In game chats I have to google something new at least monthly. Usually some new word like "simp" (usually it's a new insult-du-jour). For the initialisms, at least half the time, I can guess. I got IKR. SMH stumped me.
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Post by distractedmom on Mar 4, 2021 23:34:54 GMT
This has been such a fascinating thread! The more I think about this, the more I realize how I treat different kinds of emails differently. If I am beginning a conversation, I will use a salutation, but as replies fly back and forth, I treat it more like a conversation than mail, with short quick responses. Does that make sense? If I am emailing a friend, it is different from the emails I have sent to the administrators of my daughter's college. Those were much more formal.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 5, 2021 8:27:37 GMT
I had to google that... and had to laugh. Sounds like the techies' version of the lawyers' "It depends."
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Post by eefa on Mar 5, 2021 16:15:48 GMT
I don't have an issue with text messages but it drives me nuts that words get shorted and vowels dropped and that that has made its way in to work IMs ( we use MS Teams a lot at work). For example, k instead of ok or ty instead of thank you. I mean really? AGHGH!
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Post by radellaf on Mar 5, 2021 19:57:33 GMT
K just seems cutesy, now, with a phone or computer keyboard. A lot of the early text abbreviations were because you had to "type" on a telephone keypad, where saving one letter might even be justifiable.
TY vs typing out T h a n k y o u could make sense even on a keyboard as that's a lot less characters. I see it a lot in World of Warcraft chat (so, extremely informal context and things are usually typed in a hurry). A stereotypical exchange there is: "ty" replied to with "np". I had to look that one up. "no problem". IDK if I've ever seen "yw", in reply, though I've typed it. Somewhere I read a whole article complaining about "no problem" as a response to "thank you" as being just horrible. I was a bit surprised by it, but it makes more sense, I think, if you're asking someone you don't know well for a small favor. It's not that I'm "welcome" to the assistance, so much as I'm happy to feel that it was such a small thing for the stranger to do. Spanish has "it's nothing" as the standard reply, after all. If "it's nothing" then maybe there's less expectation of reciprocation than if "I'm welcome"? Maybe I overthink this stuff?
"np" makes me think of the "The P versus NP problem" in computing. I didn't know what the NP stood for so just looked it up. "nondeterministic polynomial time." Right, then.
YMMV, yeah, a tech "don't hold me to it." I guess that's one of the phrases that has become dated because it came from television advertising. EVERY car ad used to say that (maybe still does?). Some phrases from 1980s and 90s ads will probably never leave my vocabulary. "You're soaking in it" is one I like. "Where's the beef?" and "I've fallen..." have been rather worn out at this point. A lot of them, I don't even remember the ad, but I watched so much Mystery Science Theater 3000 that the phrases became part of my lexicon. Kinda like Shakespeare, just not as respectable. With the rise of streaming, and even DVD rentals before that, I see less and less TV. Anything newer than the AFLAC duck I probably haven't seen. At this point I'm so impatient with ads that I'm annoyed by the intro stuff at the beginning of movies, with the 20 different weirdly named production companies that all need their own animated logo. Physical DVDs have that silly FBI warning thing, but I haven't even touched a physical video DVD for probably a decade, now.
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Post by filpot on Mar 7, 2021 10:26:28 GMT
Eh, filpot , I don't think you're a dinosaur. You're just a very polite person, and that's something good.
As for abbreviations / text speak... my all time favourite is 'KWIM'... an American penpal used this regularly in her communication. It took me ages to figure out it's supposed to mean 'know what I mean'. English / US text speak is a bit of a challenge for non-native-speakers. I do understand that it makes a lot of things easier in forums / mailing lists - things like 'TBH' (to be honest) or 'IMHO' (in my humble opinion) add some politeness, but you don't have to type out all the words...
Oh, dear! Perhaps it doesn't mean the same in the US as in England, but if you say "KWIM" out loud as a word, it's not a word I'd use in polite conversation!!
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