Re: Terminology ?

At 01:25 AM 5/24/97 GMT, David Brewer wrote:

>The 'net had spawned a plethora of shorthand terms to weaken
>statements, because of the tedency for strong statements to lead 
>to unecessary disagreement and slanging matches.

Actually, many of the short forms that you mention predate the Net. They
actually come into Internet use by way of APAs (amateur press
associations).
The first APA dates back to about the 1930s. The one that I belonged to
for
5 years usually consisted of people writing articles or essays (usually
about SF, but not always; I ran a series on Scottish castles and castle
warfare), and "mailing comments." Mailing comments were essentially a
hard
copy version of Usenet, but usually with a much smaller audience;
probably
more like the mailing list but with no restrictions on topicality. In
fact,
it's the wide range of topics that I miss. I haven't found anything on
the
net that is quite comparable to an APA.

Some of the more common short forms were IMHO, IIRC, LOL, and other Net
short forms. Others aren't used much on the Net, such as:

S,AS: Smiling, Always Smiling (a way to defuse tense wording).
HHOK: Hah, Hah, Only Kidding (essentially the same as the :-)
smiley/emoticon).
REYCTO: RE. Your Comment to... (used in mailing comments to indicate to
whom
someone else's comment was for)

>From what I understand, emoticons and Net short forms have slipped into
APA
usage. This was starting to happen in the APA that I was in. At the time
it
seemed to me to be a strange anachronism (emoticons, terms like spam and
flame, etc.) used by only a few, but it's far more common these days.
Usenet
and chat lines have killed off a number of APAs. 

Just to keep this on an FT topic, does anyone know of any game related
APAs
(particularly SF, non-GW games)? I'm just curious if there are any APAs
that
might be of interest to FT players. I suspect that there are not, having
been taken over by Usenet and mailing lists.

Allan Goodall:	agoodall@sympatico.ca 
"You'll want to hear about my new obsession.
 I'm riding high upon a deep depression. 
 I'm only happy when it rains."    - Garbage