An open letter to nobody in particular:
As a self-professed elitist snob, there is little more odious to me than the propagation of completely manufactured slang or jargon, where some idiot simply decides one day that everyone on the internet is required to start using or acknowledging some inane term, acronym, or trope so they can all feel special, even if they have no idea what the term actually means.
"I said LOLerskates online, and my friend totally said ROFLcopter back, and I sent her a LOLcat photo that says I CAN HAS EPIC FAIL?...and I'm adorable...don't you like me? Am I special now? Am I a part of something greater than myself?"
Indeed you are, my fictitious little one-dimensional example: you are a part of the great and growing lingual mediocrity that comes with instant communication, unbridled conformity, and the pathological craving of acceptance. Congratulations; just like the 14 year old virus incubating script kiddies who once insisted that all real hackers were obsessed with obfuscating their typed communications in formulaic, stylized, and completely transparent ciphers, you too are a footnote in the decline of reasonable discourse via an electronic medium. Real people dont 5p34k 733+ all of the goddamned time, nor do they communicate solely in acronyms. Sentence structure, grammar, punctuation, and (dare I say) letter case plays a vital role even in this strange world of typing on little screens.
I would just like to go on record as saying, if you think you know a hip new piece of internet slang, Google that shit. Search for "intext:[dumbass phrase]" to return all pages where the term is used, and see how other people use it. If you get several pages of results, it probably isn't all that new; do the entire internet a favor and use it sparingly and within the normative context.
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