Why the *s

[Wilson Gray]

IMO, all-caps is merely *prescribed* rudeness. I'm not offended by it
in any way whatsoever. But I've seen it *defined* as "shouting" and,
hence, proscribed as rudeness by random authorities on internet
etiquette for the past couple of dekkids or so.

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain



On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
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> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: Why the *s
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 12:04 PM -0800 3/4/09, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>>On Mar 4, 2009, at 11:45 AM, Bill Palmer wrote:
>>
>>>I see many posts on this list with words that are bracketed by
>>>asterisks. Â I
>>>know that an asterisk prior to a word denotes an unattested form,
>>>but I
>>>don't know what two of them mean. Â Is it just a stray mark
>>>introduced by
>>>cyberspace or the peculiarities of the list software... Â Or does it
>>>have a particular meaning in linguistics, or possibly to list
>>>subscribers?
>>
>>it's an orthographic convention for indicating emphasis in "plain
>>text" postings. Â it originated in newsgroups and mailing lists where
>>other indications of emphasis (italics, bold face) were unavailable to
>>many posters and unreadable by others.
>>
> and it avoids the perceived rudeness of the alternative convention,
> CAPITALIZATION of emphasized items, which tends to be referred to as
> shouting.
>
> LH
>
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