More How To Type Good
In this, the moiety, we trash some more people. Specifically, we trash those who use slashes when they shouldn't and those who use certain typographic symbols when they shouldn't.
Solidi, Virgules, Separatrices, Slant marks, and Slashes
Whatever name you give these marks, which look like this, /, they are used way too often to mean, "I don't know, so guess."
In the same way that ellipses are sometimes used to imply, "You know what I mean, don't you?, so why don't you finish my clever thought for me in your own head and give me credit for it," so do slashes sometimes mean, "I can't decide which of these two things I mean, or I'm too lazy to do so, or I'm too lazy to type out what I mean, so I hope you'll take a good guess for me and give me credit for whichever guess is better."
Of course there are legitimate uses for the slash, such as for rendering abbreviated dates (97/08/15) and to show the division of one number by another (4/5 = 80%). And in certain legal documents it is standard, if unnecessary, to use a phrase such as " . . . and I/we further promise to pay the sum of $1,000 in the event that he/she is struck by a falling anvil and/or calzone while on the insured premises."
But what is unacceptable is for the slash to substitute for clear thinking and clear explication thereof, as in "I will travel to Worcestershire by train/plane." There are at least two distinct meanings for such a statement: "I will travel by train or plane" and "I will travel by train and plane."
The difference between and and or is both fundamental and elementary even to pre-literate infants, so as I see it there is no excuse for confusing the two, either in your own head or in that of your reader.
In this, the moiety, we trash some more people. Specifically, we trash those who use slashes when they shouldn't and those who use certain typographic symbols when they shouldn't.
Bangs and Smileys
A bang is an exclamation point, and a smiley is any of the many hundreds of typographical pictures that are to be viewed by tilting one's head 90 degress counter-clockwise. The standard, original smiley is :) which is a pair of eyes with a smiling mouth below them.
Whoever came up with that smiley deserves a congratulatory pat on the back, and that individual continued to deserve further pats each time it was used up until, oh, maybe the third or fourth time, which was about a budillion times ago. Now it has become, in so many people's IRC and e-mail vocabularies, the standard way to end a sentence, which means it no longer has any meaning.
Using a smiley is to originality what Roseanne Barr is to pole vaulting. Or what Mother Teresa is to gang-banging. Or what Jeffrey Dahmer is to good table manners. Or what . . . oh, never mind. You get the idea.
better segue here
Do you know what a temperature inversion is? It occurs over large cities located in depressed geographical locations such as Mexico City, and what happens is that a large mass of cool air gets trapped under a large mass of warm air above. The cool air, being denser, obeys gravity by staying down low. The warm air, being less dense, also obeys gravity by staying up where it is, and the result, especially if it all takes place in a giant bowl, is no wind. The city suffering under such a temperature inversion continues to emit ozone and smog, of course, and all that air pollution builds up and builds up and builds up because there are no air currents to carry it away. The result is a distinctly unhealthful atmosphere, one which we humans, even Californians, have not been bred to breathe.
So what? So what is I remember one time asking an IRC chum what the weather was like where she lived. She lived in Los Angeles, which was experiencing a long-term temperature inversion at the time, and she responded,
"It's really smoggy :)"
Obviously this person did not mean that she was having a smiling, happy, fun time inhaling all that soot and smoke and ozone and all those particulates. Obviously this person was not kidding, yet that's just what her smiley said. Obviously this person frequently types smileys without thinking what they mean. Obviously this person types smileys out of habit (or she's literally insanely happy).
As with any literary device, if you use it too much then you dilute the power of each succeeding instance. You know how you often hear the advice "Use it or lose it"?
Well, in the case of smileys the advice is just the opposite: "The more you use it, the more you lose it."
And if one smiley is too many, then how much worse is it to use several in a row? A lot worse :) :) :) Multiplying a triteness by three does not make it one-third as trite. It makes it nine times triter. (For those of you who are keeping score, that's the rule: You square the number of uses of unnecessary smileys to arrive at the total triteness level.)
As your smileys become more frequent and more habitual, you run into a problem I call "smiley inflation." If you end every sentence with a smiley, then after a while you realize that if you really do mean to convey a sense of jocularity, you have to type two smileys. So you get into the habit of typing two smileys, and after a while you realize that now you're going to have to start typing three. Then you decide to build an alias that types out four. You keep promising yourself you can quit any time you want, but you never do. At this point you've become a smiley junkie, always needing more. Pretty soon you find yourself running low on smileys, and you begin hacking into other people's computers to steal them. You've got a major smiley monkey on your back, and your only hope is to quit cold turkey.
But, of course, it doesn't matter, because the people in the channel who know you have learned long ago to ignore your smileys completely.
The same complaint applies equally well to the overuse of bangs. You probably haven't noticed, but I have not used a single bang in this whole rant and rave, and I go hours and hours without typing one in an IRC channel. And I have never, except as a joke, typed more than one bang in a row.
Why? Because when I do use a bang, I want it to mean something. I want people to know that when I use a bang, I really do mean that my comment is extraordinary.
Here's are two examples of the use of a bang. One is justified, the other is not. You decide which is which:
"Not up to much right now!"
"A 747 just landed in my driveway!"
And (assuming you passed the test) you know what? What's interesting about that justified bang is that it isn't really necessary. The statement itself, that an extraordinary event occurred, carries all of the emphasis that could ever be expressed.
And that's really the point here. If what you have to say isn't worthy of a bang on its own, then adding a bang isn't going to make it more so. In fact, adding a bang often has the opposite effect, that of drawing attention to the fact that what you said was more nugatory than exclamatory.
So, now you get to guess what I think of multiple bangs, as in "Welcome back!!!" What I always want to ask the senders of such messages is, "Precisely how much happier are you to see me than if you'd typed only two bangs? And, for that matter, why don't I rate four?"
As I see it, any time you type even one exclamation point you'd better have a good reason, and anytime you type more than one, there had better be a 747 in your driveway.