Has anyone else noticed this?

Ok, so I'm engaged in my usual daily routine (namely, being overworked & underpaid), and I overhear a couple of guys from the company's MIS department talking outside my office door. (Yeah, I'm still working on perma-temp status, but I've been moved out of my cubicle into an office of my own -- with a real door and everything! Except my own wastebasket. Go figure.) Anyway, one guy is telling the other guy about something he heard on on Jay Leno (or was it Letterman), and the guy tells his co-worker, " What he said had me rotflolling!"

Rotflolling? Rotflolling, I wonder --is that a word? Then suddenly, it hits me: this guy has just used the term ROTFOL as a -- well, I can't recall what part of speech it is at the moment (a gerund? participle? I know it's not an infinitive).

For those who may not know, ROTFLOL is an abbreviation for "Rolling On The Floor Laughing Out Loud." This abbreviation is often used in Internet chatrooms & newsgroups as a way to communicate to fellow chatters/posters that something is particularly amusing. Until now, I had thought that this term was confined ONLY to 'Net communications (including e-mail) as a way of saving keystrokes & minimizing space, saving time, & staving off carpal tunnel syndrome & other computer related injuries. (Note to Mindy: If you're reading this, Get Well Soon, babe!)

Well, this person at work has disturbed the equilibrium in my universe.(Or maybe I'm getting that stomach bug that's been going around.) I mean, since when have people started using 'Net abbreviations in their everyday language? ROTFLOLLING? What next -- are people gonna start saying "BTW" instead of "by the way" in their conversations? Will people care that it takes longer to verbalize "bee-tee-double-you" instead of the 3 syllables in By The Way? And I shudder to think that people could start drawing emoticons [like :) and ;) ] in the air, you know, like when people say " Whatever" & they do that thing with their hands.

What I'm asking y'all is whether you've noticed other folks adding 'Net speak to their vocabularies. Are other people saying "rotlflolling" or "rotflolled" or "HTH" {Hope That Helps} or BTW or IMO or any other abbreviations when they're talking face to face with other people? Are people making emoticons with their hands instead of just waving hi or giving the thumbs up or the finger? Is this a trend that has slipped by me, without my noticing? Or is it all part of a sinister Big Brother government plot to control our mind by screwing with our speech?

And what if this "language" is turned into just another form of slang, that no one will be using in a few years (or months)? How will we communicate online & offlline without sounding like totally uncool geeks?

I'm hoping that this MIS guy is the only one doing this. Mainly because I think it's kinda silly. And also because I don't feel like having to translate Netspeak to everyone in my office over the age of 40 (especially that one chick who just now found out that you can shop through the Internet).

The whole thing makes me want to :O (scream).

Feedback from you guys will be appreciated. It would put my mind at ease.

Chirping (& definitely NOT "rotflolling") through the night,

Cricket

In article , [email] (Cricket) wrote:

This whole post got me rotflolling myself. I lolled to myself so much I couldn't sleep thinking how funny this was.

:D - ha ha ha, look! I'm laughing so hard I fell down on my side! RMFQTSHGDF, http://animation.acmecity.com/model/347/main.html

What does RMFQTSHGDF mean? (And how would one pronounce it, if they were going to be pretentious enough to use it in conversation?)

Cricket

Cricket wrote:

I don't know what it means, but I'd pronouce it: ram-fa-cute-shag-doof. I don't know why I'd pronounce it that way, but I would.

well it has "shag" in it, so it's good enough. ;-)

In article ,

I don't know, I just made it up. I guess it's "remficktishgudduf".

for example:

bob: "I laughed so hard, it was totally remficktishgudduf!" joe: "Aw man, I bet you were rotflolling like a bastard!"

cb (who still thinks that story is hilarious)

Cricket wrote:

I've no idea.

Don't know, but you could always go to http://bell-labs.com/project/tts to find out. ;-{)>

MIKE (a.k.a. "Progbear")

make GEORYN disappear to reply

"The only completely consistent people are dead" --Aldous Huxley

N.P.:nothing

Cricket said:

I've seen other people do this too. Um, the last few years, I guess. Almost everyone's online these days.

finger?

I saw someone do that at a wargame convention.

Sincerely Yours, Jordan

"Man, as we know him, is a poor creature; but he is halfway between an ape and a god and he is travelling in the right direction." (Dean William R. Inge)

"Cricket" wrote in message news:[email]...

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Very well Cricket, I'm happy to oblige. I think this represents a silly and pretentious effort to appear to be "with it." I think it makes the speaker appear foolish. Fortunately I haven't actually seen anyone do this.

As far as using emoticons in speech: Many years ago Victor Borge did a comedy routine in which he told a story, making silly noises to represent each punctuation mark. Alan Sherman wrote and sang a version of "Night and Day" in which he included punctuation. (I have the LP--you know the strange flat disks the aliens left.). It was done for comedic effect and it worked quite well. I have to wonder why anyone would want to intentionally make themselves appear so silly if they weren't being paid for it.

R. K. Henry said:

I remember that -- I saw it on a show called "The Electric Company" about 20+ years ago. I wound up being the only kid in my first-grade class who could master punctuation! (Someone really needs to put that show back on the air.)

And my Mom tells me that she's heard people use "dot-com" in regular conversation (dot-comming, dot-commed, dot-coms, etc. etc.). How do we stop this before it gets completely out of hand?

Cricket

On 18 Dec 1999 19:43:24 GMT, [email] (Cricket) wrote:

You don't. The Mighty Principle of Common Usage is conqueror of all it surveys!

Actually, there's been times I have to stop myself from using "LOL" in conversations (saying the letters L-O-L, not saying "lol".)

Kyle, he who means well The Shane Andrews of alt.sports.baseball.chicago-cubs

Ahh, yes. Now, I was in junior high when The Electric Company was on, but my younger brother and sister were still in grade school, so I watched it with them. Hey, it was the early seventies: there was only one television in the house, and you could get all of six channels. Great practice in learning the art of comprimise. Anyway, of all the PBS creations, that one was the best. Which was probably why it was the shortest lived.

That was my introduction to Victor Borge, too. My dad told me he had seen him doing that routine years before, though. Come to think of it, my kids could have benefitted from seeing him. Oh, well.

And what about Naomi? Tune in tomorrow for Love of Chair!

Peace Kevin

On 19 Dec 1999 01:31:17 GMT, [email] (KTrick45) wrote:

Personally, I have fond memories of Sesemee Street BE (Before Elmo). Actually, the whole of Muppetdom (is that a word?) is great, IMO.

The Muppets rule. I was just watching the "Muppet Christmas Special" which is the coolest Christmas special ever even if it aired once in the 80's and never again we have it on video. Anyhow what I was thinking about the Muppets that is cool is that they can support sort of traditional values- family, friends, compassion, etc.- for a family audience without being something that is also promoting ultra- conformism, consumerism, etc.- in fact it promotes difference and diversity and not being normal (hey, there's a bunch of animals, aliens, hippies, and nerds!). I guess Daria does that pretty well too, although not to a children's audience.

Dagny

Dagny said:

Absolutely.

I agree. Another thing I like is that the Muppets show that "nice" doesn't mean "boring". The characters genuinely care about each other, and are fun.

My stepson's liked Daria since he turned 12. Then again he's a pretty smart kid.

Sincerely Yours, Jordan

"Man, as we know him, is a poor creature; but he is halfway between an ape and a god and he is travelling in the right direction." (Dean William R. Inge)

And they don't just sit around being nice and going "Aw, you're so good, and nice." "Yeah, so are you." "Aw, really? Thanks". I just saw the play of Little Women this weekend and so much of it came across like that. Our school has a new director for our plays and the plays are fairly well-directed and we've had nice sets and all but the quality has gone downhill: no more Shakespeare, and this is what we get instead? When Mr. Rose did it we had Our Town and As You Like It one year and Inherit the Wind and Midsummer Night's Dream the next. no more.

anyhow the Muppets are more real than that, believe it or not :)

I was talking about younger than that, like, early/middle childhood. I think to counteract the emphasis on "socialization" in early elementary it's good to have something where it's OK to be different.

Dagny

http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Workshop/9441/

"This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper." -T.S. Eliot

Daria code: Ap D+ T5 W1 Q+ Fn^Fr O+ OH m c MV- C5X F:113,201,305 BB+ FCJ -DT+ q+ fT^fD

Dagny wrote:

smart

think to

good to

My sister's kids are supposedly Daria fans and they're younger than that. I don't know if it's because they really like Daria or if it's just because Uncle Bobby is a fan. I know they're nowhere near as fanatic.

{snip}

To my shame I have heard myself use the verb "grep" from time to time - grep is a Unix command used to find given strings in a file, so you'd do something like

grep foo boggle*

to find the string "foo" in all files whose names begain with the word "boggle".

"grep" is just such a nice word for "searching really thoroughly and with a degree of panic", somehow - "I grepped all over the flaming house but could I hell find that screwdriver". "Where have you been? Dave's grepping all over the mall for you".

I've not heard "rotflol" off-Net yet, though.

Apparently '404' is also in fairly common use among wannabe techies for "didn't have the faintest idea", from HTTP error 404:

	Error 404
	Not found - file doesn't exist

Me, as they say, too. It'll definitely all end in tears.

Cheers

Tony

I remember a comment made in my Comp Sci class when the instructor told someone (might even have been me ^_~ ) to dig through a ~500 page manual: "You can't grep dead trees!"