Monday, March 06, 2006

Pet Peeves 1

The religion I founded today – Misanthropism – is not an ad hoc low-tech denunciation of the human race. It requires deep introspection about and organization of every facet of human iniquity. In the spirit of such an inquiry, I post here a list of my pet peeves, grouped under various spheres of pitiful human endeavor and ranked from least odious to most.


Linguistics and language

4) Overuse of abbreviations (lol, ttyl, ttys, mfeo, imo, imho, etc.) and smileys ( :-), :-( , :-~. :-}, :-{, etc.).

3) Punjabi, Bihari, Arabic, many South Indian tongues, and Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and the like. These languages variously sound like swear words, gastric noises, vulgar bedtalk, and bird mating calls to my untrained ears. (I apologize profoundly for any positive notes here, but I am inspired to mention that well-spoken Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, and French are ear candy for me).

2) When people judge intelligence and sophistication by command over a language, especially English. Some of the smartest people I’ve come across are very ineloquent. Many sophisticated minds have little linguistic abilities, and many who speak well and can spout Shakespeare have ghaat mentalities.

1) Fake accents. Though there is a case to be made for switching accents to optimize communication, fake accents and pronunciations plain piss me off. Among such, my supremely loathed events are English interspersed with anglicized Hindi (rolling the ‘r’s in “kajraare”, Shw-etta instead of Sh-way-ta, Ma-rod-iya instead of Maaro-diya etc.), American accents – and not very good ones – used by wannabes who’ve never stepped on holy American soil, proud admissions of non-fluency in Hindi (the perennial favorite “I’m sooo out of touch with Hindi, you know”. I know, illiterate), and overuse of crutch words like “like” (definitely no pun intended) and “anyway-z” as in (“He’s like, you know, like sooooo handsome. Anywayz, moving on….”).


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