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Trying to stay on-topic, I thought it was kind of bizarre considering the
profile of the average poster to online forums. Suburban drug use figures
are pretty similar to what goes on in the cities even though it gets fewer
headlines, but the folks who frequent techie and gamer forums are
overwhelmingly middle class and much more likely to be buying and selling
their drugs from behind the driver seat of a yuppiemobile than on a slum
street corner. Mostly, what I see on the net is not any form of ethnic
subculture patois, but merely the typical misspellings and bad grammar we
see all around us every day ("you're a looser," and the ever-present,
eternally annoying interchangeable ("you're/your" "it's/its"
"there/their/they're"), combined with an amazing obsession with sexual and
scatological topics.
Gene Kim-Eng
On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 3:13 PM, Porrello, Leonard
<lporrello -at- illumina -dot- com>wrote:
> Regardless, I don't think what Kevin was talking about was bizarre. If you
> are a professional writer, you'd have to be a fool not to consider how best
> to respond to prevailing lexical trends in a potentially huge target
> audience. How does the fact that a large portion of your smart phone app
> users speak or at least write in the suburban, middle-class equivalent of
> ebonics affect how you write your documentation?
>
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