As a wise man who one of my cats shares a first name with once said, ‘there are two types of people in this world: those who like Neil Diamond and those who don’t.’ In my version, the Neil Diamond part becomes, ‘to use annoying words and typographic characters.’ I am one of those who don’t. Which is tough, considering I work in an industry filled with production-related lingo and verbiage. While I’ll give in to a “copy that” here and a “what’s your 20?” there, I refuse to use phrases like “looping in,” or end emails with “best,” preceding my signature. I don’t know why it bothers me so, but I recall a brunch with some of the members of my diverse friendship tribe (ahem, David, work your magic there) during which we had a discussion about the various phrases we loathe. Amongst the frontrunners were “cup a’joe” and “how many Benjamins will that cost?’ along with Sara Buskirk's hatred for words containing a double O sound. (Booooooth. Spoooooon. Pooooo.) So all of us on the ‘those who don’t’ side have our various hang-ups and I respect each and every one of them.
Recently, the trend on the good ol’ Facebook has been to add an @ symbol to a person’s name when responding to a comment:
Michael Hong Damn straight. Aint that the truth.
What’s the point? I understand it when you’re tagging someone in a post (and note, the @ symbol just serves to link and does nahhhhht end up appearing in the post), but to just add this stupid @ to let the person whose name you also write know that this is your response to his or her specific comment, is so dumb. It’s really dumb. For real. (No offense, Mike Hung. I guess you just really like Neil Diamond.) One day I finally expressed my annoyance with this in the daily email chain:
show details Sep 17 |
Thankfully my amazing friends always have my back and were right there ready to come up with an alternative for this obnoxious crap, based on our smart friend David Tousley explaining that the @ symbol is, in some countries, referred to as a piggytail (but not in Italy, where it's called 'snail' and not in Germany where's it's called 'spider monkey.' And especially not in Russia, where it's called 'doggie'). Thus, an alternative was born and incorporated into our vocabulary, with, of course, some variations along the way:
show details Sep 30 |
show details Sep 30 |
ROR!
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
show details Sep 18 |
show details Sep 23 |
David, you better get your story-telling pants on for Saturday b/c I wanna hear it.
show details Oct 21 |
show details Sep 30 |
show details Oct 18 |
show details Nov 17 (2 days ago) |
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
show details 8:11 PM (19 hours ago) |
show details 8:29 PM (19 hours ago) |
piggybutt David, ZPH sleeps with her cute little alphabet blanket every night. It's so warm and soft! Will you ask your grandma to make a me-sized one? Instead of the alphabet, she could sew extended family phrases on it.
Piggytail: A way to get someone’s attention even though you’re already referring to them by name. Use in place of @ on the Facebook. Not to be confused with the hairstyle. Pigtails and Piggytails are two very different things.
No comments:
Post a Comment