Predictably, as soon as I put "ninja hamster" into Google, one of those idiotic pictures defaced with internet twatspeak came up as the number one hit.
By the way, people, the picture I was referring to was posted later in the thread, so the guessing game referred to in this message that turned up on my profile shouldn't have been terribly hard. Now to deal with this:
""twatspeak" is neither widely-accepted, nor terribly descriptive. It makes people guess what's offensive to you while tying it to a word that's offensive to anyone. That's ugly human behaviour."
Stealth negative!
Strange, isn't it, that a thread involving bouncers has resulted in The Bouncer With No Name having a crack at me. Come on, out with it - who's it who won't stand by their own words? Take up your beef with me man-to-man. Or woman-to-man, if you're Not A Dude. It makes no difference to me.
What I'm about to write is
completely off-topic, it being nothing whatsoever to do with Richard Hammond, but given that the above quote refers to what I wrote on this thread, here it stays. Of course, I could have kept it as a private message if only the objector had revealed him/herself...
Internet twatspeak = the combination of the following three scourges:
(1) The mangled words usually spouted by (but by no means restricted to) gamers who have either a chronological age or mental age of 16 and under. Examples include "haha pwnd"* the ridiculous substitution of numbers for letters - or punctuation marks - really any ASCII code.
* By the way, it pains me to have had to write that.
Really pains me.
(2) Text abbreviations which are just plain hateful, as well as being inappropriate for a message board - you've got a keyboard in front of you, not just number keys - use it! Besides, with predictive text and about 200 characters per message there's really no need for this at all - not that I use predictive text and I still write the whole word.
(3) - and this is the most recent and most painful one of the lot - the intentional maiming of both spelling and grammar as seen on (fuck, here comes something else that it's going to be painful to write) icanhazcheezburger.com. I heard rumours that the explosion of cat-picture idiocy originated on that great bastion of intelligent and reasoned thinking that is /b/ - should that be true then no more needs to be said.
Yes, I am a
massive SPG nazi. I'm surprised nobody noticed before. You know why? I pride myself on having conquered the basics of literacy before I'd even reached primary school. So should everyone else, but they're not - standards of both literacy and numeracy are cascading downwards, and it's not as if anyone with any power to stem the tide is doing anything about it. From reports of governments issuing advice about staying safe online in text-speak, through English teachers being told they have to allow said text-speak in essays (yes, even in exams), to 11-year-olds starting secondary school barely able to read or write - and we're talking simple text such as "the cat sat on the mat" that I could handle as a three-year-old, as could everyone else in the playgroup with me - as a consequence of their exposure to text messaging, the internet and, in far too many cases, their own fecklessness. It makes me angry. By the way, my aunt managed to handle not just the basics of literacy but enough to see her through, to about the official standard expected of 11-year-olds... did I mention she was mentally handicapped?
I'll stop here before I wind myself up into even more of a fury, and I would hope that if anyone is going to send further red blobs my way due to what I've said here, that they'd identify themselves so I don't have to waste any more space on this thread with a rant I shouldn't have had to write.
And now, back to your regular service. Richard Hammond. Bouncers. Far be it for me to derail the thread any more than I already have.
