[MUD-Dev2] Importance of emoting (Was: A rantagainstVanguardreviews and rants)

[Dave Scheffer]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dana V. Baldwin" <dbaldwin at playnet.com>
To: <mud-dev2 at lists.mud-dev.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2007 9:26 AM
Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev2] Importance of emoting (Was: A 
rantagainstVanguardreviews and rants)
>
> Barrens Chat for 5 minutes on a WoW RP server should convince you that
> we are both solidly in the minority when it comes to bothering to spell
> out words. But I don't think it is necessarily a question of being one
> of "those people". Take text messaging in general in modern
> communication. People who grew up with typing to other people tend to
> spell words out while "young" people often seem to miss that using "l8r"
> looks stupid to others because they have been conditioned that it is the
> norm.

The history of linquistics is invariably the study of one culture's 
pidgin-speak evolving to exalted status then fragmenting into more variant 
streams of pidgin that achieve exalted status then fragmentation... "ad 
nauseum", to use a language that was once the street cred of a gutter 
people.

It's not going away.  Anytime there is an intense/focused environment of 
like-minded people we see slang/jargon/shorthand come to dominate.  IMO 
we're better off ignoring it or finding other ways to leverage it.