Dear Sreeram, I've never found till date a satisfied tone of shoving advice with nil apprehension by peeping in "How to Win Friends" by Dale Carnegie or "Influence: Science and Practice" by Robert Cialdini. A direct: "Hey, you!" approach while deemed unpardonable and abrasive may still be redeeming compared to an ingratiating mumble: "Could you gently, kindly and sweetly". So I hope my request to refrain from using chat-speak which incidentally is disfavoured on IL is taken in the right spirit. I cannot promise immediate rewards on switching to full text hereafter but in the long and interminable run weaning away from this abysmal form of snappy contraction will yield untold returns as best practices even in informal or conversational writing. This post is not squarely directed at you but a gentle nudge to all the participants. Who knows! what-if our thread is disqualified from winning Pulitzer next year having failed in this criteria :biggrin2:
@satchitananda, thank you for the like. @oriana, sure to keep in mind while typing a post, and thank you for bringing it up.
How can one forget the countless shorts-clad young lasses who got cat-called with group renditions of "chaddi pehen ke phool khila hai, phool khila hai." Nostalgia trip -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlspEyNqgDk PS: Just noticed that Shanvy already posted the link.
Now that Zuckerberg has said Facebook is considering a dislike button, imagine the bedlam! He says it will be used to indicate 'sadness' over bad news such as natural calamities. Yeah right! Anyone who knows how the Internet works knows exactly what those dislikes will be used for. What are we in for? Dislike-brigading? People hiring click-farms in India and Pakistan to mass-dislike posts? How long before someone cites a 'dislike' as reason for 'cruel and unusual harassment' in a court case? How long before we start seeing threads on IL -- "My SIL disliked my FB status update. Now I want my husband to dislike all her posts but he won't do it!" Anyone up for dislike buttons on IL?
In Irish or Celtic literature there is a word 'anam cara' (soul friend) and for lack of similar melodious word in english I borrow from the highlanders to express my startled resonance on seeing your response. My "like" post was an oblique, you know our cherished oblique reference to news bite on announcement of "dislike" button by Mark Z. People are locking thumbs debating on social media whether FB's reductive perception that emotional state after reading a post is like/dislike should be elevated with a more harmonious click-> read/comment-> post buttons. Imagining IL coming up with such technology, do you think you or I will clock up more "dislikes"? I better talk smarmy with members now and tone down my sarcasm.
Gore, guts, gunshots! We better order armour to still telecast our live commentary from this outpost on the unfolding carnage in the first hour of "dislike" introduced in IL.
Shanvy, I've no connect with schools these days but with invasive web-fortified institutions are students not switching to auto-didactic mode scaling beyond textbook syllabus. Schools with digital libraries, wiki-walks, a few chapters pruned here and there, will prescribed knowledge deficit matter? (think-cloud)
@Oriana..and I shall continue to like posts ... With u on that one ..we are not ready for a dislike button..neither on FB nor on IL...long way to go ! Need to rethink education ...Unlike when we are growing up.. There is an abundance of information at their finger tips... I would say the process of education needs to be more along the lines of equipping the children with tools and training their young minds to sift through this information .