The Unspeak community
Jumping on the user-generated-content bandwagon
May 1, 2008 9 comments
Gentle readers often email me with examples of Unspeak, but I don’t find the time to post about them, and sometimes even fecklessly forget to reply. Sorry about that. I am happy to announce that there is an all-new Unspeak™ Forum™, where all are welcome to post links and comments on political language, interesting stories, or anything else at all they feel like discussing with the hydra-brained Unspeak™ Community™. Register (required to keep out the spambots, I’m afraid) and introduce yourself.
Can anyone join?
Sohail
Yep.
Last Friday’s issue really, but is “listen” an unspeakage for “completely ignore, while arranging vacuous PR exercises to give the impression of listening”?
In the States, ‘listening’ has become a genre of political PR, as in the case of the ‘listening tour’. The Clintons are the earliest instance in my recollection of politicans on a listening tour.
See this 1999 article at cnn.com for an example. In this instance, she held a listening meeting with business leaders, after which her husband said, ‘I think she’s done really well. I’m really proud of her.’ It’s nice to know that she is such a good listener in meetings with business leaders.
You know there’s a new Forum, right?
I don’t want to appear ungracious, but I detest web forums and find them fundamentally unuseable. I’m sometimes surprised by how passionately I hate them.
Would you at least promise that there will be no animated avatars, no hat-wearing smileys, and no pictures of kittens? (Though you may wish to set aside a forum for lolunspeek.)
“I’m sometimes surprised by how passionately I hate them. Would you at least promise that there will be no animated avatars, no hat-wearing smileys, and no pictures of kittens?”
Due to a personality defect, I find pictures of kittens with captions inherently funny.
If you put one up here saying “I can reedz Slavoj Zizek”, most people would be annoyed, but I would be amused for days.
lolunspeak
I can haz linguiztic subterfiuj?
It is infuriating, but seems true, that a single lolkittypic can give a remarkable boost to a blog’s visitor statistics. It is also sad and disheartening. It may also tend to corrupt a blogmaster. For certain, McCain’s KarlRove MkII bot will already be crunching the lolunspeak possibilities for November.