APOSTROPHE NOW
By Carrington Vanston - January 7, 2004
http://www.carringtonvanston.net/archives/apostrophe

Welcome to the Internet. I see you're new here. Look around. Get comfortable. It's a big place, but most of it is friendly. Actually, most of it is trying to sell you something, but much of the rest of it is friendly.

I've been assigned to fill you in on some of our literary conventions. You didn't think you could just spell words accurately and use correct grammar did you? Oh no, we have a different way of doing things here. We call it: illiteracy. It's all the rage with the cool kids.

The first thing you should know is that if two words sound the same, they are interchangeable. No need to fret over homonyms around here, no sir! Feel free to mix words like "there" and "they're" and "their" randomly and inconsistently--none of us can tell them apart anyway. Such freedom, huh? I knew you'd like that.

It gets better. The words don't even have to be true homonyms as long as they sound vaguely similar. To those of us who have embraced Internet illiteracy, there is no difference between "then" and "than," or between "accept" and "except."

Best of all, you can use "should of" and "would of" instead of "should've" and "wouldn've." Plus, every time you do if you listen really carefully you can actually hear an English major sob.

Pretty good so far, right? Well there's more, and it's all about ease of use. Your convenience is paramount. For instance, throw out your capital letters because you won't need them any more. We're all about lowercase in these parts. The first letter of a sentence? Lowercase. Proper nouns? Lowercase. See how easy it is?

However, don't go thinking you can do away with your shift key. It's important to type characters that require the shift key, like exclamation points (can't have enough of those!!!). That way your reader will know that you could capitalize letters, you're just choosing not to because you want to express your individual and unique style.

And like everybody else, your individual and unique style is that of an asshat.

Speaking of exclamation points, that brings us to punctuation. The general rule for punctuation is an easy one: don't. That's right, you can just leave it out altogether! Life is so good here on the Internet. Remember, the goal when you write on the Internet isn't to communicate, it's to express. No need to fret over interpretation or specificity. Just embrace what is easiest for you. I'll tell you what: just be as lazy as possible and you'll fit in fine.

If you really must punctuate there are three things you can do to fit in. The first is to end your sentences with either two periods or at least four of them. Never use just one period, and never three. Your individual and unique style calls for two periods at the end of a sentence. Or four periods. Or perhaps sixteen. My personal rule of thumb is to depress the period key and keep it held down whenever I pause while writing.

The second of your individual and unique punctuation choices is to remember that on the Internet an apostrophe is used for two things only: first, the word "it's" should contain an apostrophe in all instances except when substituting for "it is"; second, an apostrophe indicates that a noun is plural. Thus: "the jogger's ran buy the car's well listening to there MP3's." There is a simple elegance to Internet punctuation.

Your third individual and unique punctuation choice concerns the comma. Oh how we love the comma. What's fun about the comma is that it can be used anywhere. It is a meaningless mark and that is the key to its joy. Personally I like to finish writing first, then go back to sprinkle fistfuls of commas liberally and randomly about. I'm the Johnny Appleseed of punctuation.

On the other hand, what you must take care not to overuse--in fact, not to use at all--is the return key. Paragraphs are unwelcome on the Internet. Remember that the goal of your writing is expression without communication. Nothing forwards that goal so much as serving up your text in a giant homogeneous mass like something from a literary spittoon. If at first you still struggle with the urge to use paragraphing, you can always simply substitute a particularly long series of periods.

Finally, a brief word about spelling. Remember the ease with which we dealt with homonyms? That's nothing when compared to the simplicity of Internet spelling. Here's a handy tip: you can just make up your own words. If it is even remotely possible to pronounce any given string of meaningless characters the way you intend, then that's good enough for the Internet. You can type "b" instead of "be." You can type "do u c?" instead of "do you see?" You can type "i ownz j00! i am a haxx0r!" instead of "I live in my parents' basement and have never kissed a girl."

If you do not know how to spell a word just toss out a guess with as many letters doubled as possible, and then tack "(sp?)" after it. Embrace the delicious irony of writing something on a computer attached to the world's largest system of information access and still not being bothered to spell correctly.

The purity of the scorn you can show for your reader in such a simple action always brings a tear to my eye. I love this place.

As always, the rule is that you matter but your reader does not. Do not waste your own time whenever you can more conveniently leave the work to your reader. You matter! You have things to do and places to go! Let the peons untangle your text and puzzle over its interpretation. Let their eyes squint and their brows arch. Their efforts are inconsequential. Meaning is meaningless. You have better things to do than to make yourself clear.

Befuddle your reader, mislead your reader, but above all disdain your reader. Welcome to the Internet. Pull up a keyboard and just start to bang away on it.

With your face.

Carrington Vanston
carrington@carringtonvanston.net

[This article is released to the public domain.]