jspr » language

A question of pronunciation as a means to communicate.

Jasper — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:44:12 +0000

Words are a tool for effective communication. To my mind, communication is the relaying of one concept from an individual or group to another individual or group. If a message makes it from one party to another, understood and intact, communication has been successful. Unfortunately, in conversation, you get assholes who receive the communication, unpack it, understand it, then point out to the sender all the things that are wrong with it.

Person A: How is this pronunced?
Dickhead: Don’t you mean pronounced?

What has this achieved? Dickhead has made an individual or group aware of the fact that Person A mispronounced something, but he’s also conveniently informed everyone that he’s basically a complete waste of oxygen and should probably be avoided at all costs. I would urge you to do the same. If someone prefers the perfect execution of a message to the content of said message, they are probably not worth your time.

As a footnote, I am very pedantic when it comes to planned written communication. Misspelled signage, incorrect punctuation et al are a sign of laziness or unjustifiably high self esteem (I know I’m right, I don’t need to look it up). Short, observational blog posts do not count as planned communication, so if you’ve spotted a mistake, I’m not a hypocrite and your observation of my hypocrisy is moot. Ha.

Speaking of…

Jasper — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 12:42:13 +0000

It’s fun to purposefully mislead people; luckily, conversation is a great vessel for this.

As well as xkcd’s awesome example, I like to say “speaking of [something]” as a precursor to a topic, when said topic has never even so much as been alluded to. It’s best to do with confrontational people—you then get to try and convince them that you had definitely mentioned it and they probably weren’t listening.

Sometimes boredom is a dangerous thing.

Dropping the “there” homophones

Jasper — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 09:53:41 +0000

The thing that probably annoys me most about the internet and forum-dwelling is grammar Nazism. The funny thing about it is that in the eventuality that you lapse concentration and use the wrong “there” or “your”, you get jumped on by people who don’t even contain the mental capacity or historical knowledge to be language purists—they’re just irritating pedants who found something popular and easy to remember to pick up on.

That’s why I’m proposing a change. The one thing you notice about the people who constantly pick up on this stuff is the fact that context dictates the “there” you should use. They always know which one you should be using, so why are the different ones necessary? Because of this, I’ve decided to drop the words “there”, “their” and “they’re” from my dictionary (for non-official text, obviously!) and replace them with “ther”. Think of it as refactoring language—streamlining for production!

If it works, I’ll replace “your”, “you’re” with “yor”. Might do that one anyway, it looks better!