That blog posts that begin as an extension of the post title make for quite an interesting read. Not surprisingly, I’m the only one who does this sort of a thing. I’ve done this quite often in the past, mostly in posts announcing one of my articles on Linux.com. For all the English teachers in the world, for all the books, guides, tutorials, howtos, documentation and help on grammar and syntax of any language, there seems to be no coherent writing-style for blogs.
The blogosphere, truly allows people to be unique. Some may argue that the speech patterns for each individual are unique as well. I, however disagree. If you focus your attention on random conversations, and at some point attempt to make some sense from it all, you’ll discover that you can always, with unnerving accuracy, group people into categories based on their speech pattern, their choice of connecting-words, the words they use most frequently and how they blend their native language into the sentences they are speaking in some foreign language.
The most common example of this, perhaps, is ‘yaar’, the desi word for friend. It’s also used as a connect-word and as something you use in a sentence to refer to friends or to finish off your expression of shock and/or surprise (come on yaar, what’re you saying yaar, stop this yaar).
So, if you are attentive enough, you can fairly accurately place people into various groups. And these groups can be age, work, education (where they studied), marital status, etc. Needless to say, you don’t need to hear a person to be able to place her in one of the two predominant groups: male and female. (OK, I apologize for this sorry-a$$ joke interrupting the interesting observation and breaking your concentration.)
Because of this lack of grammar or writing style for the blogosphere, people have absolute freedom to write whatever however. Yes, you read that right. People have the freedom to write whatever they want, and they can write it however they want. It’s not so simple with speech, since people learn to ape popular phrases and begin using catchwords just because everyone around them is. That’s why it’s so easy to tell what group a person belongs to. For instance, having never been to a college, I’ve always called a Samosa a Samosa. But, college kids in Delhi, don’t call it that. They have some other excuse of a name for it, which makes perfect sense to them and their group/peers, but is as alien for people like me to understand as the Vulcan salute.
Of course, you can group people into various sections based on their choice of clothes, music that they like, celebs they think are fashionable, their political orientation, etc. but there’s no fun in that. But, to be able to judge someone solely on their speech pattern is quite a talent.
So, at the end of the day, what’s the purpose of this post? Isn’t it obvious? I’m simply asking you to be more attentive!
Begin Disclaimer — I’m a Trek fan. I use vi. — End Disclaimer