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To Stet Or Not To Stet, That Is the Question

Posted by timothy on from the why-the-monkeys-poke-and-prod dept.

theodp writes "The NY Times' Virginia Heffernan confesses to being stumped by how to excerpt the language on message boards and blogs. For example, Heffernan notes she could quote kavya on Yahoo Answers word for word ('How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?'), but worries that doing so makes kavya look like an idiot rather that the sweetly earnest 7-year-old that he or she might be. Is it better to paraphrase or revise the question into 'How is a baby formed?' For now, Heffernan is going to let things stand (stet) and treat message boards like novels, preserving idiosyncrasies of language as far as possible and taking them as intentional — a 'wuz' on the Internet remains 'wuz' in the paper."

3 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Well? by AsmordeanX · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    AHAHA!

    I had my speakers up pretty loud. That startled me then I started laughing and yet a piece of me cried at the destruction of our language.

    I've a feeling that grammer nazies will patrol the comments to this story in full force.

  2. Re:who's the idiot? by KGIII · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    You know... I get mod points often and yet you are on my NOT FRIENDS list 'cause I put you there. Why? Because of you, I'll take a karma hit for this if I must. But, really, you picked to respond to something at the top just to get eyeballs on what you said. You have an agenda and that is okay but it has a place. Sometimes I even agree with your agenda but I won't ever agree with your methods. You are like a Microsoft fanboy or shill only you use worse tactics. The beautiful thing is that I know that I support FOSS and, oddly, proprietary and I also support my government some of the time. At all times will I respect your rights to your views and at all times would I do the totally retarded thing and stand up and defend my country no matter how crappy it is being run. But, more importantly, I abhore you to a T and I absolutely respect your right to say what you want and how you want but, honestly, if you're looking for converts you're doing it wrong. I read at -1 all the time and don't mod friends or enemies other than how they are modded by the community so I see your posts and sometimes you say great things. Then, well, sometimes you spout gibberish at the absolute wrong times in the absolute wrong manners.

    --
    "So long and thanks for all the fish."
  3. Re:who's the idiot? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Warning: Twitter sockpuppet. Mod down.