Returned Rant Mitigated by Email Address

I'm still thinking about my crankyness from yesterday, although without the anger, so I'm going to write it out. Cleaning the pipes, people. Maybe I'll post about Mr & Mrs Smith later to ease the blow.

(But wait! Good news! By popular request, an EMAIL address for me! Find me at shrewit@gmail.com. No naked pictures.)

OK, so I hate "LOL." I loathe it. It ruins things for me when I read it in an email or in a blog or really just written on a napkin. My hostility towards this abbreviation is vast and very irrational. Perhaps it's because I'm more of a "Bwahahahahaha" or a "snort" and other onamotapeia kind of writer. But I think it's the same knee-jerk reaction I have to baloney like "nite" and "brite" and "cheez" and my most recent hot button, "Feelin' good in the neighborhood."

[You don't feel good, you feel well. Embrace the adverb. And dropping "g" is fine when you're talking, but don't institutionalize it. Why not just go ahead and say "Makin' your ass fatter every day"?]

But back to LOL...I laugh a lot! Why not LOL? I think it's the written form of an emoticon, about which I have very mixed feelings. :) (Die, Smiley! Die!) Maybe it's the email abbreviations? "RU" "Thanx" and so on. (My students invariably send me some sort of coded missive by email in the first week or two of a semester and I get to mock them openly in front of their peers and remind them that they're writing an English teacher while she's on the clock. What fools these children be. I am not this shrewish to friends and non-students, fear not.)

There are so many nifty ways to say things. (Like the word "nifty"! Heck, people used to say "23 skidoo!" And we're reduced to "LOL"?) We are blessed with a language that bends, so why not bend it rather than reducing it to its skeleton? Words like "brite" look naked and shivery. Give that word a "gh" to keep it warm, for pete's sake! Is neon so expensive???

So is it just me? Am I a bitch who gets a little too attached to language? To paraphrase Calvin Klein, if loving synonyms is wrong, then let me be guilty.

(Hahahahahaaha flashback: "A little club soda will get that out." "LIAR." "Obsessive, the new fragrance from Calvin Klein." I miss SNL.)