(via)
Another addition to this list (or to a superlist comprising several related lists):
looooooovvvvvvvvvveeeeeeeee
as in, "OMG, I looooooovvvvvvvvvveeeeeeeee that show!!!!! :P"
I see this indignity being visited upon any number of words: love is just the first example that came to mind. The problem is that while multiplying letters in a word is a perfectly valid stylistic device (depending on the formality of the context, of course), some discrimination has to go into which letters are going to overflow all over the page. The O and the V are OK in this context, but the E? What we've got written down here is not a long one-syllable word, but a long two-syllable word. Extending the silent E makes it not silent anymore. The word above would rhyme with movie.*
RIGHT: Whaaaaaaaaaat?!
WRONG: Surpriiiiisseeeeeeeeee!!!!
That is unless someone really did shout, "Surprise-eeeeeee," which would be legitimately surprising [slash, terrifying].
* Actually, love in fact is either a great or a terrible example because the sound we want to extend is represented by the O, but writing multiple O's results (as any I-Can-Reader could tell you) in an oo sound, as in moo—such that even loooooooooove would be wrong: you'd have to pronounce it not like a long love but like a long loove (U with a line over it).
4 comments:
Misopogal once ended one of her mid-day e-mails to me with what should be a rather elegant answer to the double-o "oo" problem:
"I LOoooooooooooove you!!!!!"*
The L and O are capitalized, so you're reading it as "LO" before entering the inevitable series of short-o's, at which point your mind's self-pronunciation system has already launched into what IPA dictionaries call a "ʌ" sound.
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* number of sequential o's may not be exact
COooooooooookie Crisp!!!!
I would write that more like "CoooooOOOOkie Crisp"
I think the cookie bandit (you know he was a bad guy because he wore a mask) added a vowel-shift syllable among the o's, which I represented onomatopoetically with the capital-O's.
See? This is the language revolution our generation is going to be responsible for. We're not just the people who made "ha ha" into "lol;" but the people who, by breaking free from standardization, found ways to expand the capacity of the written English language for communicating through clever and elegant use of all available tools. By being forced to communicate through text, we invariably will discover new and interesting ways to convey all of the subtleties of spoken language.
E.g. wanna make fun of the increasingly malapropic (as of 2011, it will have 12 teams) "Big Ten Conference?" Add a ~ in the middle: Big~Ten.
I'm so on about this.
Totally agree with your Cookie Crisp transliteration. Don't agree with the language-revolution idea, though: there's a difference between new, creative ways of saying things and inarticulate, unreflective gibberish (q.v.).
I don't have any opinion about the Big Ten. That's some sort of athletic organization, right?
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