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.All orthographic features have been affected.For example, the status of capitalization varies greatly.Most of the Internet is not case-sensitive, which thus motivates the random use of capitals or no capitals at all.There is a strong tendency to use lowercase everywhere.The 'save a keystroke' principle is widely found in e-mails, chatgroups, and virtual worlds, where whole sentences can be produced without capitals (or punctuation):john are you going to london next weekThe lower-case default mentality means that any use of capitalization is a strongly marked form of communication.Messages wholly in capitals are considered to be 'shouting', and usually avoided (see p.35); words in capitals add extra emphasis (with asterisks and spacing also available):This is a VERY important point.This is a * very * important point.This is a very important point.There are, however, certain contexts where capitals need to be recognized.Domain names in Web addresses are lowercase; but pathnames (after the first slash) are case-sensitive.A capital letter may be obligatory in a business name (especially if trade-marked).Indeed, a distinctive feature of Internet graphology is the way two capitals are used-one initial, one medial-a phenomenon variously called bicapitalization (BiCaps), intercaps, incaps, and midcaps.Somestyle guides inveigh against this practice, but it is widespread:AltaVista, RetrievalWare, ScienceDirect, ThomsonDirect, NorthernLight, PostScript, PowerBook, DreamWorks, GeoCities, EarthLink, PeaceNet, SportsZone, HotWired, CompuServe, AskJeeves.More complex examples include QuarkXPress and aRMadillo Online.Some of the new names cause difficulty, in that long-standing orthographic conventions are contravened: for example, sentences can begin with small letters, as in eBay is interested or iMac is the answer, a problem that faces anyone who wants to start a sentence with a lower-case username or program command.Spelling practice is also distinctive.In English, US spelling is more common than British, partly for historical reasons (the origins of the Internet), and partly for reasons of economy, most US spellings being a character shorter than British ones (color vs colour, fetus vs foetus, etc.).New spelling conventions have emerged, such as the replacement of plural -s by -z to refer to pirated versions of software, as in warez, tunez, gamez, serialz, pornz, downloadz, and filez.Non-standard spelling, heavily penalized in traditional writing (at least, since the eighteenth century), is used without sanction in conversational settings.Spelling errors in an e-mail would not be assumed to be an indication of lack of education (though they may be) but purely a function of typing inaccuracy.Opinions vary (see chapter 4).Chatgroups and virtual worlds also make a great deal of use of non-standard spellings which reflect pronunciation, such as yep, yup, yay, nope, noooo, for yes and no, or such forms as kay and sokay ['It's OK'].Emotional expressions of horror, shock, and the like make use of varying numbers of vowels and consonants, depending on the ferocity of the emotion: aaaiiieee, yayyyyyyy.Some deviant spellings have become so widely used as to be virtually standard in this variety, such as phreak, phreaker, phreaking for freak (etc.).Some are still restricted to certain groups of users, such as the -y- spelling (from byte) introduced into certain expressions for bit blocks of different sizes: tayste or tydbit (2 bits), nybble (4 bits), playte (16 bits), and dynner (32 bits).The dollar sign sometimes replaces S, if some sort of dig is being made about costs, as in MicroS / oft, and a £ sign can replace L, asin AO £.Teenage users, in particular, have introduced several deviant spellings, such as kool [cool] and fone [phone], and the replacement of a lower-case o by a zero, as in d00dz [dudes] and l0zers [losers], or percentage sign, as in c%l.Among this group of users, the k is often used asan emphatic prefix, producing such forms as k-kool, k-awesome, and k-k-allright.The extent to which deviant spellings and esoteric neologisms can be used to produce a cool jargon has been dubbed leeguage by some.Ihnatko explains its etymology: 22 'Originally named in honor of Pamela Anderson Lee's bosom, which, like this language, is completely unnatural, constructed with tortuous effort, and conforms to some vaguely perceived standard no one comprehends.' He gives an example: Hay! Odz r he wen 2 Radio Hack 4 anucrys 4 hizrainbow boxx! 23Punctuation tends to be minimalist in most situations, and completely absent in some e-mails and chat exchanges.24 It is an important area, for it is the chief means a language has for bringing writing into direct contact with (the prosody and paralanguage of) speech, as well as conveying a great deal of information about grammatical construction.For Naomi Baron, punctuation 'reveals how writers view the balance between spoken and written language' [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]