Comments on: Mind Your Language

By: Rob Warner

Rob Warner — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:10:11 +0000

As far as I’m concerned, you’ve only communicated when the reader understands your message. Whilst you can’t cater for everybody having more than three brain cells, communicating without considering the likely audience, isn’t really communicating at all. In which case the only purpose served is to make the author feel better somehow.

By: JackP

JackP — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 07:11:35 +0000

Chartroose, haven’t seen IYKWIM before, but I think I’ve managed to decipher it, if you know what I mean.

As regards the other ones, IANAL (and indeed you’re right, it sounds a little dubious) is ‘I am not a lawyer’. You should also be able to see the expansion of the acronyms/abbreviations used on this site by hovering your mouse over them… (at least, the ones with the dashed underline)

By: Shannon

Shannon — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:44:19 +0000

A friend and I were out to lunch recently and she informed me that she was unsubscribing to a mutual friend’s blog for this exact reason… the mutual friend never proofs and is so scattered with so many misspellings and typos and unclear thoughts in general that it was unreadable. I told her I’ve resorted to relying on the photos of this person’s blog for the same reason… can’t follow a single thought that was attempting to be expressed. It was always as if she wrote a 600 word post in 4 1/2 minutes while cooking a meal with the other hand and then hit publish without even glancing at it ever again.

By: chartroose

chartroose — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 22:16:53 +0000

God, this is funny! You should attempt to publish this one, Jack. It’s the shit, IYKWIM.

I am puzzled about one thing, though. What does IANAL mean? I try not to anal too often, myself.

By: JackP

JackP — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:16:59 +0000

…ah well, either memory serves me incorrectly about which papers I saw it in, or the online version is not the same as the print version I saw. Just as well I did say I wasn’t 100% sure

By: duncan

duncan — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:14:10 +0000

From what I can tell, The Sun printed with both words asterisked:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article87261.ece
whereas the Guardian printed with neither:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/apr/22/football.raceintheuk

By: The Goldfish

The Goldfish — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 10:53:53 +0000

I think the golden rule should be read over before you post. You can find the odd typo or grammatical errors in great works of literature, but if it makes sense to you when you read it over yourself, you’re probably in the ballpark.

All the irritating errors are those where it seems unlikely someone read it over. One of the worst things you see with comments sometimes (not on my blog, but elsewhere) is where the whole thing is in caps except those letters which should be capitalised. So clearly the person had CAPSLOCK on, still managed to press SHIFT in the right places but was in such a terrific hurry, or was so fantastically idle that once they started, they couldn’t be bothered to go back, start again and make it legible.

Either that or their CAPSLOCK key was stuck…