{"id":15457,"date":"2017-01-15T11:38:34","date_gmt":"2017-01-15T16:38:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2017\/01\/15\/15457.html"},"modified":"2018-03-09T15:46:09","modified_gmt":"2018-03-09T20:46:09","slug":"communication-abbreviation-con","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2017\/01\/15\/communication-abbreviation-con\/","title":{"rendered":"Communication, abbreviation, consternation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

OK, so I recently saw a tweet that was punctuated with a picture polished fingernails and I have no idea what that was supposed to convey. I was able to search on the internet for a sort of emoji translator<\/a>—I still don’t really understand the nuance, but I have a verbal version (indicates nonchalance) that will more or less do.\n

But I’m wondering… Is this going to happen to me increasingly frequently as I get old? I don’t expect to share a whole lot of cultural references with Young Persons, but I am able, more or less, to figure out what bye, Felicia<\/i> means in context. I expect there to be a lot of slang I don’t know (I need not be aware of the nuances of Becky<\/i> as a disparagement, for instance) and I am often behindhand learning the nicknames by which celebrities are currently known, and so forth. There are catchphrases that I recognize as being catchphrases without knowing where they are from, but I often can tell what the mean, more or less, or why someone chose to repeat them at that moment.\n

At some point, probably soon, I will have drifted far enough away from the culture of Young Persons that even that will become tenuous guesswork. As I will presumably be interacting with fewer and fewer Young Persons, I may or may not notice—I will hang around with Old Folk and reference the Ice Capades and Rick Dees<\/a>. All that seems to me perfectly normal; my parents, presumably, went through something similar in regards to things being gnarly.\n

What seems strange to me is, well, first of all that I am still seeing lots of things written by Young Persons who are punctuating their tweets with tiny pictures, and further to that that I want<\/i> to still see lots of things written by Young Persons, particularly politico-social commentary. I mean, I haven’t really retreated into a bubble at all—at least on-line. The internet means that I am skimming from a bubbling cauldron of generational whatnottage, and while the few dozen people I actually follow on Twitter are mostly of an age with me, the stuff they pass along is a surprisingly wide net. Not politically wide, I mean, although I do see a few Conservatives who are actually Conservative and not wild-eyed rightist radicals, but demographically wide, which is a Good Thing for me and me perception of the universe, even if it makes me work harder to keep up.\n

And then also: it seems to me fundamentally different that the things I cannot understand are pictorial references, rather than verbal references. I’m not sure I can defend that—had the tweet in question been followed by the text [painting nails] I don’t think I would have understood it better. I suppose I have more difficulty picking up context clues with the tiny pictures, particularly in knowing what is being used as sarcasm-punctuation, or when the picture is essential to the point and when it is not. When a pundit re-tweets another publication’s headline and adds a thinking-face or a pair of eyeballs, that indicates disagreement with the tweeted article, right?\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger clapping hands tears of laughter computer mouse, bellhop poodle princess. Thinking face? One Hundred!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16338,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15457\/revisions\/16338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}