Prescription for self-awareness

[addedentry]

Some people feel superior for knowing when to use its and when to use it's (the possessive takes an apostrophe, of course). I feel superior to those people for knowing when it doesn't matter.

Recently I heard a strong opinion about the misuse of lol in place of a smiley. "It stands for 'laughing out loud'! You can't use it for your own jokes. That

Comments

[taimatsu]

What *is* the correct use of '@' on Twitter? I am but a novice and require instruction.

[addedentry]

You're doing it right!

I don't know how people will start using it incorrectly, but I reserve the option of disproportionate anger when they inevitably do.

[taimatsu]

I see :)

May I enquire as to your position on the use of ':)' ?

[addedentry]

hatmandu polled Twitter recently about left-handed smileys like what I do (-: It's as much an affectation as my insisting they have a nose.

May you have many more occasions to use ':)' :)

[mockduck]

Do you have a position on 'lulz'?

[addedentry]

I'm agin them.

[mockduck]

lol. :)

[monkeyhands]

The @ thing sort feels wrong to me when it comes to retweets. To me it's a synonym for "at". So "RT @billybragg" should mean "I'm retweeting something that I want billybragg to read", not "I'm retweeting something that billybragg just said".

I'm at peace with "lol" for your own jokes, though. It just means "Hi, I'm the office twat making a joke so unfunny that you wouldn't identify it as a joke if I looked deadpan, so I'm laughing nervously while talking. Looking forward to the Christmas party?"

[monkeyhands]

sort OF, I meant to say in the first line.

[brightybot]

A user on one of the tbox site's message boards used lol as punctuation. Iirc they posted a recipe: '200g sugar lol 300g flor lol' etc etc

[brightybot]

As we are discussing grammar I should point out that I was very unsure where to put the apostrophe in 'sites'. I probably should have rephrased the sentence as I'm really not sure it is grammatically correct anyway.

[mzdt]

it's a confidence in what you know, too, which doesn't help that generally, confidence in assertion rises with ignorance of same.

I'm paranoid now about posessive words that already end with an 's', i.e. only the apostrophe and no extra 's' - James' for example. I was doing that merrily until I was piously informed that construction was only used for things that belong to Jesus.

And now I fear God will strike me down with a thunderbolt if I get it wrong...

[jvvw]

There's a paper I read recently (maybe this one though won't download at the moment for me http://manao.manoa.hawaii.edu/97/1/Nardi-HICSS.pdf ) that discussed the use of the word lol - it's now common in certain circles to put it at the end of a sentence to soften it (in a similiar way to a smilie), something that I know do when in instant messaging type contexts.

[addedentry]

Yes, that's it exactly. Thanks for the paper (searching for the filename located a copy elsewhere).

It occurred to me that I've also turned my nose up at people for pronouncing URL as an acronym rather than spelling it out - which is not only cruel but arbitrary.

[jvvw]

Oh, now you've touched one of my hot buttons, lol ;-) It's really really excruciating when people say 'earl' rather than pronounce URL correctly.

(Juliette, just realised I can't remember my LJ password :)