beagles the gatekeeper

Interesting what you said about the spoken word and the written word, they are quite different. People are always more cautious with the spoken word. A very good reason for that is what you said, that it will live on at least as long as the paper, and of course come back to bite you in the ass, unlike the spoken word where you can claim never to have said that.

But there is something else, it is somewhat more formal, people feel like they are walking into a classroom and the teacher is standing there with that thick wooden ruler, tap, tap, tap, and they get all tongue tied and stammer and can’t get anything out. Probably the reason that you can ask somebody anything over a pot of coffee or a pitcher of beer, and they will talk their ass off, but try to get them to write a letter or anything and the best you can get are a few sentences that are so vague they are almost meaningless.

I remember that particularly well in subbing when the way to shut up a kid was to shove a paper in front of him and ask him to write about his summer vacation. Well it didn’t exactly shut him up because then he would be all whiny about he didn’t know what to write, so I’d say well tell me what you did and he would be all motor mouth, but when I said fine, write what you just said, but then he’d just stare at the paper, the pencil in his sweating fist still as the winter snow.

I don’t know why that is. Well I suppose one of the reasons is all those rules for written language, the spelling the grammar, the mysteries of the semi colon and the Goddamn split infinitive.

Myself I have always written pretty much the same way as I talk, I expect you do the same.

Which makes me wonder what it would be like if we ever met in person. Will probably never happen because I know you hate being in the awful city and I can’t see myself making the long trip up to your frozen wastes. It’s kind of nice to think of the two of us jawing away in your deer blind, but then when a deer poked his nose out of the woods I would be all like, “Run deer, this guy is going to shoot you,” and that would probably be the end of our friendship.

It’s kind of interesting this new written language, this text/twitter language, with its b for be, and 4 for for, and most interesting to me the abbreviations, like LOL (I used to think that meant Lots of Luck). I wonder how those abbreviations make it into text/twitter speak, IMHO is widely accepted whereas GFY (go fuck yourself) is not. I guess these abbreviation words start out as slang and then when enough people are using them, they will be accepted. I wonder if somebody has written a dictionary about it. Once they do there will probably become a proper text speak, a bumpkin text speak, a cool text speak, etc.

Well what would you do if you were the gatekeeper (and maybe you were) of blissfest when up pops the Arkansas traveler with his adorable big eyed kids and his friendly little dog, and he says, all wide-eyed innocence, that he didn’t remember reading that part of the rules, and maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t, but here he is with his fambly, are you going to say, “Rules are rules,” and send him back to Arkansas?