Tiny mini-rant

[taimatsu]

A swift rant about something driving me nuts on and off at the moment.

Kittens. People. Two different things.

You are not a kitten. Your friends and social group are not kittens. Bisexuals are not kittens. Only kittens, young instances of the animal commonly called a cat, are, in fact, kittens. Please remember this. Thank you.

Comments

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Oooh...me-ow...

[chrisvenus]

hey, its not as bad as 'ittens at least. :)

[faerierhona.livejournal.com]

well.. not ACTUALLY true...

baby rats and other animals (Rabbits IIRC?) are also kittens...

but yes, I have had the furries/ otherkin/ whatever rant before!

[diffrentcolours]

Wear the fork with pride!

[taimatsu]

Nono, if someone actually Really, Truly, Totally Believes that they are essentially a cat or whatever, then I can deal with that - however weird I think it.

What I'm getting at is people who are way too cutesy, all the time. They call their social group kittens, they speak of themselves in the third person as kittens. NO NO NO you are NOT a small fluffy animal with ickle-wickle ears and cutesy-wutesy whiskers. NO.

[taimatsu]

Fork? Huh? Explain!

[faerierhona.livejournal.com]

that was what my rant was about.... not REAL otherkin, sad idiots

[taimatsu]

Indeed, I may be being catty, but I am not, in fact, a cat.

[stronae.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm sorry to hear it, really. My girlfriend and I have been trying to come up with pet names for each other that are slightly unusual (so, 'sweetie' and 'honey' and such are right out), and she seems to like being called a kitten. :)

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Just out of interest, why do you have a problem with it? What is it that narks you about people doing this that you can't just brush aside, ignore, or accept?

[taimatsu]

If you do it in private, you can call her whatever you like :) As long as she doesn't refer to herself in the third person as 'the kitten' or anything like that, I suppose I can let you get away with it ;)

You are granted a Special Exemption by the Taimatsu Language Police. Have a nice day!

[stronae.livejournal.com]

Woohoo! The honour is mine. ::Smile::

[taimatsu]

Mostly I do. Mostly I read something like this, say to myself 'How silly!' and move on. But there are times when I just want people to Grow Up and talk like adults, not weird kiddie-twenty-something hybrids, twenty-four going on five years old. There are a few things I can never totally ignore - very poor spelling/grammar/punctuation/language use is one. Total self-absorption is another (though that would take a while to explain properly). And giggly over-fluffiness is another. I don't mind it occasionally, but as a regular thing, and in writing, it just annoys me. Doesn't everyone have a few things that just nudge them the wrong way? Maybe I'm not laid-back enough.

[wednesday]

CONCUR.

[softfruit.livejournal.com]

Obvious if tangential: if you don't like total self-absorption, LJ must be agony! Even I have some idea of what obsessive belly-button-fluff inspection my LJ is.

I loosely agree with you on the above rant though.

As I'm going off at tangents, there's a sign on the way to work that is killing me at the moment. It's a menu at a cafe, on which they manage to spell chilli as chile. The thought of being served thousands of square miles of south america for lunch scares me. It's quite cheaply priced, but I suppose they'd make a profit from the amount you'd have to spend on drinks to wash it down with.

[taimatsu]

There's general self-absorption, of which I am guilty as much as anyone, and there is TOTAL TOTAL MIND-BOGGLING SELF-CONGRATULATORY SELF-ABSORPTION, which drives me mad. But it is more complicated than that, and I don't want to write an essay explaining it right now :) Few people are guilty of the latter variety, fortunately.

[taimatsu]

I had a feeling you might ;)

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Oddities just intrigue me.

I wouldn't say you're not laid-back enough. I think (and please let me take the opportunity to remind you, and myself, and the viewers at home [hi everybody] that I don't really know you that well, so what I think is based on a remarkably small selection of observations which, whilst perhaps individually astute, may combine to form erroneous conclusions) that the things you react to in this way are things that you, on some level, take very personally.

I'm not sure of the exact word to describe it, but possessive is possibly closest (yet still vastly inaccurate, so please don't hit me) in the sense that you're quite protective of the opinions you form of them, and certainly in the case of the whole spelling/grammar/punctuation package, you act as if people's misuse of them, and contravention of standard rules of application, will somehow damage your language.

I will, once again, reiterate that I may, in all likelyhood, have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about, and that the opinions expressed above are Whacked-out Deductions from Rikk's Whacked-out Brain™, and that should you take exception to them, please try to not take them seriously, or in the absence of a fist of salt.

[taimatsu]

You have a point, yes. I don't know why. It's just a big You Are Doing This WRONG feeling, and there are some things which have to be done my way or they are WRONG. Very few things. And I don't often make a big deal of them per number of examples. If I get a hundred emails with crappy SPG I might be snarky about one or two of them. If that happens over a week then that's twice in a week, which seems a lot. Hmm.

There are other things too, but the one I am thinking of is way too complicated to explain.

Crappy spelling etc. does damage my language. Not my language as in the actual words I speak or write - someone's use of 'ur' for 'your' isn't going to infect my brain while I sleep and cause me to wake up thinking in netspeak - but rather in a more general sense. It's that if such things go unchallenged, slowly 'ur mah bestest buddie an i luv u 4eva' will become more and more acceptable and mainstream, and interesting, useful, attractive, beautiful parts of the language will vanish. Already, 'flaunt' and 'flout' which are different words with different meanings, are becoming conflated because people use them wrongly.

All languages evolve, but I'd prefer not to see English evolve into sumth1n lyke di5, y0.

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

Well, it's their language too, and things come into common usge for a reason.

[taimatsu]

Yes yes, but don't you see, they're WRONG. They are. They just are. Really.

[crocodilewings.livejournal.com]

And the day you can prove that in a court of law is the day the world shall be free of the constraints of poor English.

[taimatsu]

Well, exactly. It's a personal crusade, and people are free to disagree with me, and then ignore and/or flame me if I annoy them too much. But they're still WRONG, and a thousand thousand grammar books, English teachers, librarians, and philologists agree with me.

[odheirre.livejournal.com]

Oh, you are just flouting your knowledge of the English language :-).

My pet peeve is "its" versus "it's". That, and when people do stuff like "I want this approved by Jim and myself," which makes the speaker sound both pompous and stupid, which is no mean feat.

[davefish.livejournal.com]

grahamb's fault entirely.
But its appropriate here.