:rollseyes:

I willingly and fully own my unhipness and geekness. I am a goddess of the uncool. I am a paragon of keeping the faith with my own inner nerd.

It's easy to snark (!!!) about the cliches and verbal ticks of the blogosphere. But no sooner has this commentator eradicated the use of all slang from the internet, a new, more detestable set of cliches and verbal ticks will arise and he'll have to do his work all over again.

Lemme get a Coke and a bowl of popcorn and get comfortable so I can watch him get worked up again.

I'm sorry. While I understood the blogger-in-question's point, the attitude rubbed me the wrong way in a big way.

You weren't the only one to detect that. See scarlettina's comment above.

Oy, your icon has made me so homesick for an espresso that my toenails bled. Or something.

Mmmm, yes indeedy... though I'm sadly allergic to red wine. (If you're ever in Vancouver, I can tell you where all the good chocolate is to be found.) Glad you're feeling better.

Given the pattern of cliches, I suspect the author is a cranky gamer. And well... you're gonna pry the Megatokyo outta their cold dead hands before most of 'em stop that kind of stuff. Guy needs to sit on his inner editor more.

We are not un-hip. That blogger is old and cranky before his time. "All these kids and their slang! I know--I'll tell them it's not cool because it's old! Yeah, that'll shame them into better writing!"

It's sad when people don't understand why slang, catchphrases, and memes exist; and the vital purpose such things serve when people can't see each other and thus need other methods of waving their tribal colors.

Oy.

That annoys me in my sociolinguist bits, because there are good and solid reasons for why people do that, and people who constantly have a stick up their ass about developing age or network slang really overestimate their place in the universe and the evolution of English.

Thus speaks my university education.

Oh yes, it does. I actually have in my last semester notebook metrics for how one measures network density and multiplicity, the trends on people's placement in the social group and how much of the group's nonstandard variety of English they use, and in what ways it serves to enforce group identity and even group conformity. Or signal personal identity.

These things have been studied and are taught. And the people who complain about the slang usage of others are usually not a member of that group and threatened by that in some fashion.