I once read that spelling wasn’t really any kind of a thing until Webster invented the dictionary. Back in the day, people just put letters together based on the way things sounded or on some type of tradition. But that doesn’t explain words like “through” or “rough”. For those I guess it has to do with the Olde Inglish or whatever - welsh? I have no idea. But some type of Viking or isolated influence that has since been removed from our vernacular. So we’re left with a whole lot of weird words. Or is it “wierd”? I guess not since my Firefox spellchecker is underlining that one. It’s “i before e” after all. Except after “c”. And except when your writing about friends. So it’s all inconsistent. And I grew up as one of those annoying nerdy kids who aced the spelling tests and just basically always knows the right spelling and can point out when people write “there” when they mean “their” or my favorite, “then” and “than”.

Except that I’m also supposed to hate tradition and generally thumb my nose (what a stupid expression) at useless rules. Do I know what that person meant? Of course I do - if they had been speaking, there’d be little or nothing to clue me in to the difference in those words. So why the hell get uptight about it? It’s stupid.

So that’s something I’m working on - getting over the shitastic compulsion to notice spelling errors.

In parallel to all of that, I have been trying to bring in words like “thru”. Why must we type those extra bullshit letters? It’s dumb. I be done wit dat. I even keep that “thru” in proper documents. Of course, someone will always edit them out before they get published or shipped out to customers or whatever. But maybe one or two will slip thru, you know?

Now, I will say I’m not going to be about the “nu” or the “tru”. Maybe one day - baby steps. I also do have a certain sick sort of admiration for the 133t-speak and the loltok and the various other modern intarwebs types of dialogs that I see. Making shit up is good. And sometimes, making shit up that other people don’t quite understand is even better.

I once had to sit thru an entire full day training course on a piece of software. It was a requirements management “tool” for electronics and software. My company had paid millions for it. They also had to pay for these training classes - and then pay me to sit thru them. So, this software was crap (most is), but it had this really awesome feature. There was a big red button in the upper left corner. Seriously: big, maybe 5 times the size of any other buttons, and Red - nothing else was red. But the best part was that the poor lady doing the training had to devote a b ig chunk of the training course to saying “Please don’t click on that big red button”. She said it at the start, and she repeated it at various points. The button’s purpose was to run a query on the whole inventory of requirements. But it was keyed off of a dialog that you had to fill in. If you filled in nothing, then it assumed you wanted to search for nothing amongst everything. Sort of a logical divide-by-zero - which if you don’t recall 4th grade math very well, is an impossibility. SO the thing would just chug away and basically lock up the whole system. So “Don’t click the big red button”. When I got back to my desk the next day to try and get some productivity out of this new “tool” - you can guess what happened. I swear I didn’t mean to do it.

That was a way long-winded intro. The modern form of this stupidity are myriad websites that actually ask you to do really stupid things because they are too stupid or lazy to make their shit work correctly. Examples: Please disable your pop-up blocker, Please click the Trust this provider checkbox, Please set your security to Medium.

Because you did it. I suppose we can take “I just wanted to” to help us distinguish this sentence from the others that you may have given us where you were actually forced to remind us, or say to us or tell us something. “I just wanted to let you know that…. your hair is on fire.” Thanks for taking that extra time and using up those extra words that I got to read so that I could eliminate any confusion about the origins of your intent to inform. You might’ve just said, “Your hair is on fire”, and saved us all a lot of extra bandwidth.

I think it has to do with respecting your audience. As in, when we do this useless posturing, we think it is more respectful than just making the statement. Where did we get screwed up? It is much more respectful to just say whatever it is and not waste everyone’s cycles trying to get to it. SO, don’t ask someone if the sky is blue if you want to know what the weather is like. Ask what the weather is like! Don’t ask, “Are you free tomorrow night?”. Ask the person directly if they want to go ice fishing tomorrow after work.

If it’s true that “all I can say is, Wow!”, then I would’ve just said that: “Wow!”. But I had to add more words, right? Because it seems odd to respond to something (such a picture of something spectacular or a really clever post) with such a monosyllabic throw-away. And yet, adding the “All I can say is…” - is that really any better? Especially since you did add those other 5 throw-away words. Really, we didn’t need any of it. But you threw it out there. Yeah, please stop doing that.

This happens in face-to-face, but it is annoyingly prevalent on der intarwebs. You see it in comments on blogs and replies to forum posts. People want to chime in - I can appreciate and relate to that. It is self validating. I do it all the time. I’m doing it now. Just don’t do that for its own sake, okay? Look at what you just typed. Is it worth reading? Does it contribute? What is your point? If you have a point, then write that down. Maybe say, “That is the most interesting picture of a cat playing a banjo that I have ever seen”. Spark up a conversation.