Subject: [lojban] typographical rudeness (was: RE: Re: Aesthetics

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 02:19:06 -0000

Jordan:
> On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 01:56:10AM -0500, Invent Yourself wrote:
> > On Fri, 6 Dec 2002, And Rosta wrote:
> > > My own preference is to omit as much as possible, including all
> > > fullstops and most apostrophes
> > 
> > Eliding apostrophies is just plain rude. It forces the reader, likely to
> > already have his hands full, to identify the impossible dipthongs; it
> > requires an intimacy with Lojban 
> 
> Presumably And was indending to replace them with another letter?

No, just omit them except where they contrast lexically with zero.

> Anyway, imho eliding anything is just plain rude. None of use are
> compentent enough speakers to remember to pause for things like a
> cmene after mi'e and coi without it explicitly written

As a reader I have two potentially-conflicting preferences. On the one
hand, the onus is on the writer to scrupulously make my reading experience 
as easy as possible. On the other hand, I also enjoy a writer's 
individuality, untrammelled by excessive conformist imperatives. These
balance out in an overall preference for the writer to not ignore the
reader out of mere laziness and carelessness (which I think is rude),
but to follow their own whims and judgement. Consequently I often
enjoy to read writing condemned by others as excessive, self-indulgent
and gratuitously eccentric.

So put it this way, if I was publishing a Lojban newspaper, I'd take
pains to cater to the needs of my readers, so would include a full
quota of apostrophes and fullstops. But if I wrote a text for the
sake of it, and then published it, I'd publish it in the orthography
I thought best by my own lights. 

> Of rudeness though, nothing rivals using all capital letters (which
> I've seen And do) 

Do you mean because all caps is shouting, or because of the idea
that there is some fundamental incongruity between Lojban and
all caps? If the former, then yes, but not all all caps is shouting
-- e.g. headings are often all caps. And smallcaps aren't shouty.
If the latter, then the idea is silly, and the putative rudeness
reduces to the insufferable idea that mere nonconformity is rude.

BTW, I don't remember having used allcaps. Well, once, when we
were discussing El Pueblo Unido, but that's a chant -- you're
*supposed* to shout it loudly.

--And.