Thanks Weaver. I am going to look for markets to publish my pieces here in Australia. Any other suggestions off the top of your head would be appreciated.
Humor/Satire / Grammarphobia - It Ain't Just A Fear of Little Old Ladies
Yesterday I spent the whole day trying to convince myself and others that I am so important as a human being that I have to abbreviate everything I say, do, and think into text-message-speak.
I mean, I don’t have time to do such random things as spell and pronounce. I got an image to uphold for chrissakes.
Spelling is for losers and pronunciation is strictly for the literate…aka gays.
I am 2 imprtnt 2 do dat.
So I spent the whole day texting and emailing ppl with mssgs that looked like this: wassup. Wots ur sis up 2 thurs pm, u ho?
I got some messages back that said only one word, and that word was usually: biatch!
Which is weird cos almost everyone I sent messages to is anglo-saxon.
I sent out other messages about a bunch of assorted stuff that I had no intention of honouring here in the real world. Cos the thing text message short hand people know is that none of them ever mean anything they text.
The texting is an end in itself. It is the equivalent of the rent-a-crowd of the 1990s. With a mobile phone or a Blackberry you can have a virtual rent-a-crowd. You can appear to know ppl. You can appear to have a life. Even if I was the only person on earth with a mobile phone or an electronic keypad I would still send text messages out into the universe. It makes me feel special. It frees me from the here and now, not to mention grammar… that hen-pecking, apple-pie baking biatch.
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the_antagonist reviewed Version 1 -
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I’m not sure if I’m unqualified to critique this or overqualified—I’ve never sent a text message in my life. I think I’ve read a few from other people’s phones, but I’m not really sure.
You seem to sort of run back and forth between critiquing and satirizing, flipping between you and the separate narrator. The strongest points--which are the ones that made me laugh--were when the narrator was actually speaking (e.g. “aka gays,” “biatch,” etc.). Let the narrator come out more and dominate the piece and allow your opinions to become apparent more through the example of the shallow narrator than by actually speaking them plainly.
And calling grammar an “apple-pie baking [I believe you need to hyphenate pie and baking] biatch” borders comic genius.
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Weaver reviewed Version 1 -
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Okay, this is funny. Thank you for taking something that usually annoys the hell out of me (people who write in text-messaging all the time) and writing about it in a way that is enjoyable to read. I like your use of abbreviations, (deliberately) bad grammar and such to emphasize the point you are making. The concept that those abbreviations actually limit the thoughts that people can express is sort of 1984-ish, don’t you think?
I don’t know what sort of market you have in mind for your writing, but in this piece you definitely write with both humor and insight about a popular subject – just the kind of thing that publishers like to see.
commas after “Blackberry” and “keypad”
trav8434 reviewed Version 1 -
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I hadn’t considered the wider implications of text messaging and short hand spelling in general until this piece. Suffice it to say that i will be considering this idea next time i recieve such a message.
I don’t, however, see how slang presents a more rose colored view of the world in relation to oneself.
Travis
Sharon reviewed Version 1 -
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It’s cute. The idea that you could minimize things like that. People with crazy text messaging ability zoom through life. My daughter does that.
I liked your end sentence. That was the funniest part of it all. I would have liked to have seen more examples of minimizing though in your story. How you could minimize dinner and just take the “Amazing Gobstopper” (I think it’s called from Willy Wonka) and eat dinner in ten seconds. You’d save an hour preparing it, twenty minutes eating it and fifteen minutes cleaning it up. We could implant a chip in our brains so we can think messages and send them with a sneeze so we don’t have to waste all that time minimizing with the text messages. And so on and so forth…
I liked your idea. You wrote it well and I got a chuckle out of it. Good luck with it.
DCAllen reviewed Version 1 -
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The irony and wit of this piece are pleasing. And I appreciate the nod (gays as the only literate group left on the planet: yes, how true.)
While this is fine the way it’s written, I think you could polish this more. You could play more with the narrator’s mock self-importance. A few more witty lines would bring this up to the length of a short magazine article.
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