(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

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I find this slang much more difficult to understand than the english of 15 year old vietname users (which has grammatical mistakes of course, but is astonishingly good).

I really like to help the vietnamese phantrongnghia, because he undertakes some efforts trying to make it easy for me, to understand what he wants.
I even use the dictionary, if he uses a "wrong" word, to understand what he intentionally meant.

But if someone throws in an unmotivated manner some hard to understand words (gangsta-slang), I find it quite unpolite especially concerning non-native english speaking guys like me.

So I usually ignore such messages, and don't waste my time trying to understand them.

Mark

I wholly agree with you. I earned my engineering degree 35 years ago. I never had the need to to use a type weriter since we were required to PRINT our reports like in engineering drawings and that too with pencil. So the first time I sat at the keyboard was in front of a PC. I am no great typist either.

I can accept sms type of short cuts for characters like y, r, u, 2, b4, u, y, b, 4 which sound close to or same as the words they replace. But some of the short cuts/abbreviations are atrocious.

I remember times when the charge for a telegram was based on number of words under 6 characters or part thereof. One did tend to cut cost but sounds ridiculous in today's times.

I can quite understand the difficulties of people whose entire education was in their native language. It would be like greek or latin to me. So one need only try and help them in difficulties if so inclined, otherwise keep away from the topic.