wide array of death euphemisms

[Grant Barrett]

I was less bothered by the punctuation* than I was by the careless
question which gave seven phrases and asked for their etymology and
origin, which might take a lot of work to answer. I get a lot of these
through the ADS web site and call them "tell me everything" questions.
Sometimes there are resources to point to, sometimes there aren't. It's
more frustrating when they don't say *why* they need to know. A
journalist or someone professionally interested? Well, I'll put more
effort into it. A university student? A little less. High school or
elementary student? Even less. Just wondering? Very little at all.

*I'm a believer in one-pass email composition. It's faster and the
content is usually the same, despite typos. Also, the original email
we're talking about seems very readable by comparison, if you've ever
spent any time puzzling out the meanings of a 13-year-old writing in
Singlish. Even worse when they're also using Internet chat acronyms and
hip-hop slang. A few Singlish blogs chosen at random:

http://chiromint.blogdrive.com/archive/6.html
http://cookie-cream.blogdrive.com/
http://evee.blogspot.com/2004_05_09_evee_archive.html

Grant Barrett

On Aug 31, 2004, at 16:09, Robert Wachal wrote:

> I fail to understand why some folks would get their underpants in a
> twist
> over the harmless lack of punctuation in the very clear unpunctuated
> two
> lines of the message from Kara Everman. I for one am tired of these
> "barbarians are at the gates" attitudes. Considering the slaughter and
> starvation going on throughout the world, is the fact of a few missing
> commas really worthy of comment and parody?