So I not-so-facetiously suggested, as a response to Jane Hamsher's query on how bloggers can make our writing more accessible to new readers by surmounting the shorthand and in-jokes into which we sometimes slip, that perhaps someone create a Wikipedia "political blogger translation site" wherein writers can explain phrases like "Steno Sue" and "Holden gets a pony" and made-up compound wordlets like MoDo and WaPo and SoCo (no wait, that last one is an in-joke for Robin) and, whenever they feel they absolutely must employ these alienating terms, embed links in them to take perplexed readers right to the Wiki site, and I'm still waiting for it. [Update: In the comments, sngrfxz points to the Kossary, but I think when even the title of your Wikipedia entry is an in-joke you have a ways to go...]
In fact, I think we fogies need such sites for non-political stuff too. After all, there's one for leetspeak. And I've seen the acronym "BFF" about six times in the last week and couldn't figure it out at all. Ben Folds Five? Binary File Format? Bush Family Fortunes? British Forces Foundation? Best Foam Fabricators? Brussels Fashion Fairs?
Nope, turns out it's something simultaneously more innocuous and more insidious. According to current teenspeak (which appears to be a different animal altogether than leetspeak), BFF stands for Best Friends Forever. How this slipped into adult jargon is anyone's guess - maybe it's a South Park thing, which puts me at the same disadvantage that I had after I stopped watching Jerry Seinfeld and people had to explain to me references like "not that there's anything wrong with that."
Sometimes it seems like I'm in that Star Trek episode "Darmok" where I'm speaking from one frame of ref and everyone else has a different one and we're all creating our own Towers of Babel. Unlike the writer of the article Elaine discusses here, I don't view this at all as some sort of "death of civilization" marker - it's just so much jargon. At the same time, I hate feeling stupid, and that's how unexplained jargon makes me feel. I know I'm not owed an explanation, and thank goodness it's easy enough to figure these things out via a short Google search, but I dunno, part of me doesn't want to have to go out of my way just to understand blog posts by folks on my regular reading rotation. (Ironically, the BFF citing that broke the camel's back for me was by Jane Hamsher.)
In fact, I think we fogies need such sites for non-political stuff too. After all, there's one for leetspeak. And I've seen the acronym "BFF" about six times in the last week and couldn't figure it out at all. Ben Folds Five? Binary File Format? Bush Family Fortunes? British Forces Foundation? Best Foam Fabricators? Brussels Fashion Fairs?
Nope, turns out it's something simultaneously more innocuous and more insidious. According to current teenspeak (which appears to be a different animal altogether than leetspeak), BFF stands for Best Friends Forever. How this slipped into adult jargon is anyone's guess - maybe it's a South Park thing, which puts me at the same disadvantage that I had after I stopped watching Jerry Seinfeld and people had to explain to me references like "not that there's anything wrong with that."
Sometimes it seems like I'm in that Star Trek episode "Darmok" where I'm speaking from one frame of ref and everyone else has a different one and we're all creating our own Towers of Babel. Unlike the writer of the article Elaine discusses here, I don't view this at all as some sort of "death of civilization" marker - it's just so much jargon. At the same time, I hate feeling stupid, and that's how unexplained jargon makes me feel. I know I'm not owed an explanation, and thank goodness it's easy enough to figure these things out via a short Google search, but I dunno, part of me doesn't want to have to go out of my way just to understand blog posts by folks on my regular reading rotation. (Ironically, the BFF citing that broke the camel's back for me was by Jane Hamsher.)
0 comments:
Post a Comment