Sunday, January 29, 2017

How To Completely Misread Your Friends And Family On LIne 101

Welcome to my common cold, which I caught from Flower Girl and Beatle Boy.  Only now it has turned into a bummer of a cold...or something.  I don't have a fever but I have an infection which means I should go to the doctor if my body is not fighting this off on its own anymore.  And I've felt like I've had the common cold for over ten days now.  Thankfully it waited until this weekend to really hit me hard, like the kids mom last week.  She missed three days of work and hardly ever is sick. So hopefully with another day of rest I wont wake up tomorrow and have to go to the doctor.  I also have such a good relationship with this doctor, that she might phone in what I need since I have Chronic Asthmatic Bronchitis.  Have I mentioned before how much I hate to go to the doctor and how much I hate being sick?  I thought so.  I'm inclined to speak my mind.

I'm not going to talk about the state of the nation this week, because it's too damn depressing.

I'm also not going to talk about my past great loves, same reason.

What I am going to discuss is tone.  I've read a lot of comments over the years on the internet and I've noticed one thing that really pisses me off.  I miss hearing people speak their minds instead of reading it and having to supply the tone.  Which we all do and I'm betting most of us believe we have the tone correct due to the words chosen, or punctuation used...or not used, or caps.  But I'd bet most of us are wrong and never even caught it.  Instead arguments or debates spring forward where none were necessary.

Lets try and experiment.


Sorry I love you


Seems innocent enough.  BUT OH the many ways to say that sentence without punctuation or context. 


How about now?


SORRY!  I love YOU!


or now?


Sorry,  I love. . .you. . .


or now?


Sorry.  I LOVE you!


Boggles the mind a bit doesn't it?  I mean how can you really tell what a person means when their words might me harsh but there are not caps or punctuation?  I suppose you could look at who is saying it and hope you know them well enough and that they haven't changed, to assume what they mean.  But even that sometimes is wrong.  And how many times have you been slightly snarky on line to a friend, but it was so ambiguous as to not be caught, and you just let it go?  I know I have.  And usually to my snarky sarcastic friends.  I don't even know if they notice the duel edge to my abilities with words.  But I was raised by a woman who had a sharp wit and tongue to go with it and she was older so she didn't care what people thought.  And she told me that a really intelligent person never has to swear or be obviously mean to someone they want to insult.  A really intelligent person can make an insult sound like a compliment.  Like the old joke:  Two kids are found to be arguing by their mom and the mom says to the older child, "Tell your sister, 'You're sorry!"  and the boy says to his sister, "YOU'RE sorry!" 

If we are going to continue to bury our faces in our books and phones instead of talking with real people next to us, we need to be much better at the written word.  And the internet is destroying our language.  Some of my friends actually only use this kind of internet/street/slang to speak on line and I find it so distracting after awhile, not knowing all the 'LMAO' 'IMHO' acronyms out there, I get frustrated and don't even read them anymore unless they are attempted to be written in a complete language.  I can handle misspelled words, auto-corrected.  But u for you?  Really?  You can't type two more letters?  Come on people.  Lets keep our written word alive.  I know the language will always mutate and grow and common slang becomes common words.  It's a slower process than we realize but it happens like all change.  And perhaps I'm just getting too old to 'get with the times'.  Maybe I don't want to 'get with your times'.  Maybe I'll just be me and keep saying the entire words on line and maybe someday I'll be looked at like the old ones in Fahrenheit 451 who memorized entire books, and remembered holding one and smelling one and enjoying the escape.  Perhaps many of our arguments and paranoid feelings would be completely gone with a little bit more care in our typing and a lot more questioning of each other to be sure we are correct in our assumptions.

Cheers



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