For Old Codgers and Crazy Cat Ladies ONLY
 

OK those young'uns are all over the board dropping text talk initials and shit.

I just read a post about L4D2 - like that was supposed to make sense...

I can puzzle out some of this WTF shit but not all of it. I think the older types here on RB need a place where we can set up our lawn chairs in the shade and have a cooler full of drinks on hand.

If you remember PONG being a great invention, then welcome. Pull up a chair and sit a spell.

Feel free to yell: "You God Damn Kids Get Off My Lawn!!!!"

It'll make you feel better. :D

To post or not to post? I'm certainly not old or crazy, but something in this thread is pulling me in....

You are certainly in the target audience, Mr. FR...

Feel free to cuss, spit and toss some crushed beer cans around.

And if any of those punks DARE lean against your White Van, we can give 'em hell. :D All they're good for is running down to the store to pick up whatever we forgot to stock in the cooler and clean up the yard after we've gone home to pass out drunk. :skull-big

When I was their age the only "Zelda" we cared about was "Fitzgerald" and there sure as shootin' were'nt any "Legends" about her. My first MP3 player was a cassette recorder that I held up to the radio to record songs by Wings (if my brother could keep his mouth shut during "Band on the run", that is). And ya know what? We liked it that way!

Damned kids.

I once chatted on line with a woman 15 years my senior. She was a professor of political science as well as an English literature lecturer, left-wing fire brand, and frankly bloody terrible at writing on line, using all this text speak, refusing to capitalise etc etc etc. No wonder university graduates these days are a bunch of illiterate, hapless morons.

Left-wing firebrand....

So one day I pulled her up on her 'English' skills, ok I'm not perfect but then I don't teach English. She told me it was internet etiquette to write that way. I told her it was fucking annoying. She stuck to her etiquette line so I asked her if she went to a posh finishing school in Switzerland to learn her 'etiquette'?

She blocked me!!!!

Lefties eh?

So the moral is, all this deterioration of language skills has nothing to do with age, it's trendy middle aged, middle class socialist academics thinking they're cool that are doing all the damage.

YES!! love this thread idea, but as a relative youngin' myself i'll just chill back and try to soak in the wisdom of my 'elders'.

Damn, I sit here with you. I used to call myself a computer geek. My first program was written in Atari Basic (remember those sweet lines numbers), my first USB flash disk was VERY expensive (128M). And now? I've never red my emails on a cell phone, lol. Those kids ....

Now all we need is a serving wench to pass out the beers....

Remember the Commodore 64?

And all those word games?

*walk east - [enter]*
You are at a dead end on the forest path.

*search trees - [enter]*
You find nothing.

*walk west - [enter]*
You are in a clearing in the woods, there is a path that leads to the east.

*die now - [enter]*
That action is not possible.

How did this become a political discussion? I guess that's the problem with talking to old people like us; a touch of nostalgia quickly becomes a touch of senility. I guess when you're really old your greatest goal becomes finding someone to blame for shit that bugs ya. And it's always gonna be the same fucker. For everything. It's like the Dukes and Boss Hog.

I could launch into a monologue about how many "right wing whackos" (I mean, if we're getting into name calling...) use the same truncated language while spouting off about how "politically correct" (honestly, the phrase has been used so much it has no fucking meaning anymore it's just noise. Attacking it is like wearing an "I Like Ike" button.) the world has become and how much "better" it was when they were younger and the murder rate was higher. Why bother? Who fucking cares?

It's not a "left vs right" , "academics vs street smarts" thing in my opinion. It's a world where we want to communicate so badly that we no longer have a common language. True, language either grows or dies, but this new abbreviation of words isn't really growth is it? It's replacement. And not a decent replacement at that.

And Flesh:

I LOVED THOSE GAMES!!!! They took forever, but we all thought we were on the cutting edge playing them. I still have a couple of them on disc.

Hey, who remembers the true floppy discs? Or better who remembers when you used a cassette recorder to store programmes for the ancient school computers?

Man this is a great thread.
My first computer - a Commodore vic20. Learned to program basic on that. Then an Amiga.
But fuck all that. I have a degree in CS and I've grown to hate tech. Screw Facebook, Twitter and the like. And cell phones for that matter. None of this makes the world or people better.

I remember watching Neal Armstrong landing on the moon (I was really little but still). That was something.

Ah thanks, good question. :) My fault and I'll hold my hands up to it. I was simply telling a story. But the way I see it, a discussion about language will always be politically loaded, it's inevitable. You mentioned political correctness. That is something that has been around for centuries, modification or control of language, culture or religion for political ends. The Tudors and Stewarts were good at it. In modern times the English practiced it in South Africa in an attempt to quell the rise of Afrikaans culture. Those good old Nazis took it to an extreme. And most recently the Maoists actually invented the term and employed the tactic as part of their revolution. In Britain it was used by the left (ironically) in a McCarthyite type witch hunt, going after people whose language hadn't been reconstructed to fit their ideal, and careers in social care were ruined because of it. I have this on authority from a very senior and very skilled social services manager from an inner city borough who was around to see these witch hunts in the 80s under the GLC. These people weren't sacked because they were crap social workers, because they set out to offend people, or because they discriminated against anybody. They were sacked simply because of their not keeping up with the latest politically acceptable language. I was a snotty nosed kid then, perhaps I needed to be around to witness it to fully understand it, but my friend described it as 'living with the thought police'.

Ever hear that song 'Think! It ain't illegal yet!'?

Have a think about the language you use today and compare it with how you spoke growing up. How much of that is politically influenced? When I was growing up we went to the Chinky and the Paki shop for food. These weren't terms of abuse, simply abbreviations of Chinese and Pakistani, in the same way Fish and Chip Shop has been abbreviated to Chippy for decades, but then some bright spark got the idea that it was offensive to say it. I wonder how the fish feel about the chips? Now you can't even go there without inviting a storm of criticism. Of course a minority of idiots didn't help with this, daubing 'go home Pakis' on the wall, firebombing corner shops, marching for rights for whites etc etc etc. Easy to see how the assumption arose that you only used the word 'Paki' if you hated Pakistanis.

That is political correctness in language. It doesn't change what is in peoples hearts, only what comes out of their mouths. I'm all for not offended people unless they invite offense. But as one person put it on another forum once, 'these days people are not taught how to think, but what to think'. For me that is the most dangerous aspect of political correctness, or political or social conditioning, the idea that your values and opinions are something that should come pre-packaged to fit in with an ideal of an academic, political or social elite instead of something that is developed over a lifetime of environmental influence, absorbing those influences and actually being allowed to reflect upon them and then express your findings. Or perhaps put more simply, just being able to make up your own mind about the world around you.

It has nothing to do with left and right, as I said political correctness has been a tactic of those that seek to govern us for centuries. Probably the one glimmer of hope that our own Western cultural revolution of the 60s offered was that we didn't necessarily have to accept the social conditioning of our predecessors, but unfortunately that all got swallowed up when the whole shebang was hijacked by politics.

(By the way, I've spent almost an hour on this post, much of that was spent considering whether I should use some of the words I have. I hope some of the language used does not upset anybody. That is not my intent, it has been suggested in this forum that I don't always appreciate how some people here can mistake my meaning and find it offensive. But believe me I do, I'm not daft, if I actually wanted to piss somebody off I know exactly how it's done! :) )

I can't really comment on the rest of your post EvilJ until you clarify a little for me. Are you calling me a right wing whacko? Are you assuming because I took a swipe at my former online leftie friend that I must be a supporter of right wing politics? Or do you just see politics as being either of the left or right, without any middle ground or any alternative ground?

Oh, and you bloody kids, get off my lawn!!!! :D

ha, hopefully i can throw something valuable into this thread tommorrow, but right now the alchohol won't allow me to process such a long text.

Anyway, just wanted to throw in how much the 'hey kids get off my lawn' talks remind me of clint eastwood in gran torino, the epitome of a pissed off bitter old man, a character i really enjoy.

I've not seen Grand Torino yet, but I am a Clint Eastwood fan. I'm more reminded of the old lady in Any Which Way But Loose shooting up the bikers on her lawn!

Not the best acting, but, pretty good movie, not eastwood's best movie, by far...he looks OLD in the movie. Can't comment on 'any which way but loose', but, check out Gran Torino, pretty good movie overall.

Ah, but FR don't forget, language evolves, otherwise we would all be talking like we are in a Shakesperean tragedy...

My first computer was Sinclair Spectrum, the one with the rubber keyboard, and I remember, taking ages to load a game using a tape deck, only for it to crash near the end and you had to start all over again.

Hey, all you PC geeks out there, anyone remember a database language called DBase?

Note: I've taken liberties with your post (cutting key points) because I wanted to show you something. It bugs the Hell out of me when people do the exact same sort of thing with my posts, so I hope you aren't cut from the same cloth as I am, but I really felt the need to do it in this case.

Politically correct language actually does have an effect. I live in the US. I'm Black. I've seen, in my lifetime the virtual death of certain highly offesive words [another note: Before some asshole jumps in with "Those words aren't dead". I said VIRTUAL death. They haven't disappeared and we don't live in Utopia. They have just been culled to numbers that are vastly lower than when I grew up in the South] and that has actually made people think before speaking. They have said to themselves "Is it worth pissing everyone off around me and alienating people by using this word?", then they don't use the word and they don't spread the attitude as virulently as it used to spread. In other words, they have become sensitive to others reactions. True, some of them may be as bigotted as ever, but they aren't spreading that bigotry to everyone like they used to. They're spreading it to a smaller group.

Any attitude towards society is learned behaviour, and by losing these words, these people have in effect, lost their public teaching license. The result? Interracial marriage is no longer a taboo in most of America, most Blacks frown on other Blacks who use the "N" word, the need and want for affirmative action has dropped severely [another note to the same assholes: I said the want has dropped. Not disappeared.], people of all races, sexual orientations and sexes have joined upper levels of society in a productive way and the crime rate has dropped like a fucking stone in heavy gravity.

You exemplify what politically correct speech does in your post. You talk about a subject, then clarify that you don't mean to offend. Why? Because you realize that certain language does offend. Now that may just be your hard wiring, but I've seen people who were very unaware of themselves do the same thing. I never, ever saw people do that in the 70's. Just saying.

As for calling you a right wing whacko, I never did that or intended to do that. I called you senile. Cause you're old.

Now get off my lawn and turn that fucking music down! (I can't wait for the Pat Boone version of that song to come out. Such a nice boy.)

BTW: I don't see politics as extreme "right" or "left" with no gray between. I see the majority of people flocking that way though. I blame the media. And the internet. And rock and roll. And junk food.

Okay. I don't BLAME anyone. I just see it.

Why are you still on my lawn? Edna, fetch me my shotgun!

I can't argue with EvilJ - some language doesn't need to be uttered...

But I can't argue with FuckingRotter either - don't censor my head...

I fall back on this quote from Woodrow Wilson (and if you have NO idea who he is - get the fuck out of this thread, you're too young!!! :D )

Woodrow Wilson, speech (1919):
"I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking."

It's a double edged sword - ban the hate talk and you can't identify the rabble rousers. Let that sort of shit go on in public and it just breeds more of the same...

But these youngsters, they have no poetry left in the language. Everything has to be snipped down to fit their tiny attention spans. Instant everything...

And no sense of history, which ruins appreciation for culture - in which language plays a key role. I was at work once with three others who were all under 25. I mentioned the War of 1812. Not one of them knew what that was. DAMN!!!!! That just blows my mind.

And YOU!!! Kid!!! Run down to the corner and get me a pack of smokes. What do you mean you aren't old enough? Shit, when I was twelve I could walk into any store and buy a pack of cigarettes for a dollar. Why the fuck you think I got a paper route? What? No, not computer paper, you idgit... Damn NEWSPAPER!!!! What do you mean the fucking dinosaurs printed the last newspaper in the Jurassic age?

Just get off the fucking lawn you little snot, before I call your mom...

Christ, where are all the Crazy Cat Ladies? Down at the Bingo Hall???

:D:D:D:D

Oh man, I used to sit by the radio for hours waiting to tape that one song... :cool:

And then the fucking DJ would talk all over it for like a full minute... :eek: