On ALt-CaPs, shrthnd, and omgwtfbbq!!!!11one...

I need to brush off the dust on my writing skills. I've been microblogging for so long, I think I forgot how to write a decent blog. Gomen.

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Admittedly, there was a time when I tried using alt-caps in almost everything I type down on the web [and text messages]. I thought it was cute. I thought of jumping on the bandwagon and rolling down the path of looking adorable to the reader. I tried it on for size and lasted for maybe a week [or two]. My MySpace was the only reminder of that failed era, and I had the mind to alter the profile page to "normal" when I thought of logging in after some years.

I stopped because I felt ridiculous. I stopped because my pinkies were getting tired of hitting the shift key alternately with every keystroke. I stopped because it didn't look cute to me anymore. I stopped because I didn't want future web archive researchers to pull up my pages and see some unholy method of sending a message across. I stopped because back then I was also using the shorthand messaging system [SMS]. hW wUd U LyK 2 b RidiNg tHs s0rT f tXt w3n 8s aN unG0dLy tYm F d DaY? [reading, not riding]

I stopped the alternating caps, but still I continued with the shorthand system, nonstandard as it was. There was a very good reason why me and a lot of Filipinos used that: messaging was limited to 160 chars/peso. You'd want to cram as much information in one block as not to waste the precious peso. I stopped when UNLITxt was born. Sure, my thumbs were doing twice the normal amount of keypressing in a message but at least my words were not truncated to the point of misunderstanding. I can't count the number of times someone got mad at me because they misread my message.

The problem there was I was so used to that method. One sleepy night, I was jolted awake while proofreading an essay I wrote. Gods only know why a huge bulk of the essay was written using shorthand. I could understand it because it was my shorthand style, but going through the whole thing I could see where major miscommunication would have happened. And, clearly, a failing mark on that particular paper. I swore off shorthand then and there. LOL.

Speaking of LOL, nowadays, acronyms are booming. I was a mere child when I typed my first "lol" on mIRC. Fast forward to today, there seems to be an acronym for every emotion people have. OMG, LOL, ROFL, WTF, FTW, BBQ, FML, MLIA, TTYL, IDK, BFF, GTFO!, the list goes on forever. At least these letters are standardized by groups that collate every acronym typed on the Internet. And every now and then, a new acronym pops up and I'd have to search it on google to see the expanded form. It's not bad, but it's prone to abuse. So don't abuse the acronyms kplsthx.

What really pisses me off though, are these two niches on Filipino/Filipina social networking site users that first emerged from the bowels of Friendster. That niche crept slowly into SMS and eventually found their way into other booming social networking sites. I joined Facebook to escape the idiocy that crept into relatively clean Multiply, but alas... they're already here. These two niches are best explained by the following:

Friendster x Facebook

and this little example of the "unholy method of sending a message across" I mentioned earlier

I tried opening that girl's FB account but it was private. I don't want to imagine how her wall looks like.

Please, for the love of all things grammatically, spelling-ly, punctuational-ly, and CAPtuational-ly correct; DON'T BE LIKE THESE GUYS. [Yeah, there are no words for most of them.] And while you're trying not to be like them, what do you think about them?