Background to my query.
In other news
Londonistan autonomy soon
I'm opening this up. Is it useful to use terms like "lolberal" (whatever you think about "liberal") and "m8" (whatever you think about "mate"), and now "Londonistan".
LW believes that using light-hearted terminology helps diffuse the conversation and keep it friendly, but I've tried to privately explain that it antagonises me, one reason why I'm now holding back from directly responding to LW's messages in a certain thread (the only one I've seen his vocabulary go in that direction, but I claim no omniscience).
"M8", to me, implies a sarcastic tone of a word that I wouldn't even expect to hear directed at me by my actual, RL, peer group. "Lolberal" and "Londonistan" indicate a deep-set bias and/or preconception. Am I so out of kilter that such liberal (NPI) use of these terms is, after all, unthreatening and non-mocking.
I've been communicating by text-only media for more than two decades. I used 1337-5p34k before txtspk was even invented. There wasn't BBCode or HTML formatting when I began and so we indicated stressed points through alternate ways of indicating *bold* and /italic/ text and we also (almost!) all knew how to use apostrophes, at least before the Eternal September, webtv and Google Groups came along and
spoilt things democratised the fledgling Web and adolescent Internet. So maybe it's just me.
I
will tolerate these... neologisms... if I'm obviously alone, or a minority. I'm not averse to using the odd TLA, ETLA or even VETLA (Three Letter Acronym, Extended (4) Three Letter Acronym, Very Extended (5) Three Letter Acronym), which I appreciate is somewhat cliquey (and possibly impenetrably archaic to some, possibly even patronising), but I'd like to make sure I'm not in the silent majority, first.
It's not been a hasty decision, to open this up to public discussion; I'm prepared to be shown to be wrong, or simply outdated. So over to you. (And of course I hope this is a civil, if diverse, conversation. If conversation there is.)
(Poll, perhaps?)