I don’t blame Alice Bradley for this entire phenomenon: for starters, I’m a huge fan of her writing. But when she tweeted (from her @finslippy account) that:

“I hate to be so judgmental, but if you write “gawd” instead of “god,” I think you might be awful.”

…she tapped into a growing zeitgeist of people determined to scorn others for not using language to their liking, especially online. Her followers chimed in, most of them agreeing with her, many suggesting other words no-one should ever use: the hubster, hubs, hubby, The Boy, and The Man were all vetoed as ways of anonymously referring to the man to whom one is married (though props to the woman who replied in frustration, “What’s OK then, the penis??”) Frack, frick, totes, bestie, and kiddo were also given short shrift, among others.

Full disclosure time: I have, in the past, written “gawd”. I may do it in the future. Fairly soon, in fact. It’s also possible that I’m awful.

Sometimes, not often, I feel uncomfortable using the word God. Because it’s fraught with all kinds of complications and associations for me. Gawd to me is more of a saying than a reference to an all-powerful deity who may or may not exist. I’m not trying to be twee or cutesy (although maybe I am those things), I just sometimes want to be a little more linguistically playful and slightly less sacrilegious.

I like having fun with language and watching it change and get used in new ways. I get riled up by egregious spelling and grammar mistakes, and offended and appalled by racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic and anti-semitic use of language, which is still oh so very prevalent. And of course, there are certain words and phrases that just plain irritate the hell out of me. But I tend to think that says more about me than the person saying “24/7″. (It says I’m intolerant and hateful, obvs.) (She said obvs! It’ll be natch, next! Yes, yes it will. Natch.)

Last week, well-known blogger Sarah Brown (not that one) wrote a guest blog for Dooce, which, in case you can’t be bothered to click, was titled: “None of them has ever said LOL”. Ostensibly lauding her favourite Twitter users (I think Tweeple can get you killed), it was really criticising the majority of tweeters for doin. it. rong. For not making their tweets into an art form, not espousing the most witty, acerbic, entertaining insights possible, for not floating above the fray, the fray being those plebs who sometimes update more than once in an hour, or actually carry on conversations with their friends. “I wish my entire feed was people like Josh Allen (@fireland),” wrote Brown,  “who tweet once a day at most, and hit that one out of the park.”

Twitter is a way for me to stay connected to my friends and the outside world. While I try not to tweet run-of-the-mill thoughts, seeing it solely as some kind of stage on which to perform stunning acts of semantic dexterity seems both pedantic and  pretentious.

And it reminded me of a woman I know (in the sense that she’s an acquaintance of an acquaintance), who writes for a high-profile US website and who used to follow me on Twitter before I violated one of her essential Twitter rules. I didn’t know that was what I’d done until she later crowed about how if anyone mentioned their follower number, EVER, she would never follow them again. And then wrote a blog post detailing her rules just to make sure we understood how serious this was.

I understand not being thrilled with people who regularly report on their growing (or otherwise) follower count, or being sick to the back teeth of people who tweet begging for more followers by some arbitrary deadline, for no apparent reason. But there’s a simple solution to these annoyances. UNFOLLOW. Unsubscribe. Turn your head away and go back to watching Good Times and bogarting that can, man. (I don’t know how a Reality Bites reference slipped in here, except that these criticisms remind me of unwashed, too-cool-for-a-job Ethan Hawke sneering at Ben Stiller for working for The Man. (And I don’t mean his hubs.))

This is why people sometimes think top bloggers are elitist. They’re the only ones invited to certain parties at blogging conventions, and they sometimes pronounce themselves experts on what you should say and how you should say it. However tongue-in-cheek this criticism is meant, it is meant to criticise, to bring people down, to challenge really very innocuous behaviour because the cool kids want to be hip and deadpan and if they so much as see an unironic DH or hubby or Gawd it might damage their image beyond repair.

How is any of this different from pretty blonde cheerleaders laughing at the geek in “mom jeans” wearing bottle-thick glasses, or walking past the girl with unfortunate skin and coughing “pizza face!”?

Call me old-fashioned, but I think there should be an element of noblesse oblige: if you write a very popular blog and appear on TV and have been published in some impressive publications,  maybe you could cut others a little slack. Even if you don’t have a superior attitude, (and I know Dooce doesn’t, and find it hard to believe of Sarah Brown or Alice Bradley, either) if you go around slagging off other bloggers it looks smug and superior simply because of your own success. It’s kicking people when they’re down (at the bottom of the Technorati rankings).

Seeing some of these conversations unfold, I feel like I’m back at school. And I hated school. While I was never really bullied, school was where I went to get my spirit crushed and my natural exuberance flattened. I became introverted, ashamed, internalising the criticism I received for liking a certain group, or wearing my hair a certain way, or using a certain expression. I could never seem to get it right, so the logical answer must be that everything was wrong with me.

I tried to bend myself into the shape people wanted, a human pretzel. Desperate not to offend, I never made any real friends.

But I thought we’d all grown up now. Thought that after 30 we could stop making sweeping statements about people’s character in order to feel good about ourselves, or from judging people on the basis of totally superficial things. However tongue-in-cheek those judgey tweeters and “cool kids” with their internet rules may be, what they’re doing is as old as time. It’s mean girls 101. It’s divisive and depressing.

Can’t we just let each other be huge dorks if we want to be?

Does life have to be a pathetic repetition of high school forever after?

Aren’t you tired of telling and being told what to do, how to act, and what to say yet?

I mean, really.

I mean, GAWD.

I don’t blame Alice Bradley for this entire phenomenon: for starters, I’m a huge fan of her writing. But when she tweeted (from her @finslippy account) that:

“I hate to be so judgmental, but if you write “gawd” instead of “god,” I think you might be awful.”

…she tapped into a growing zeitgeist of people determined to scorn others for not using language to their liking, especially online. Her followers chimed in, most of them agreeing with her, many suggesting other words no-one should ever use: the hubster, hubs, hubby, The Boy, and The Man were all vetoed as ways of anonymously referring to the man to whom one is married (though props to the woman who replied in frustration, “What’s OK then, the penis??”) Frack, frick, totes, bestie, and kiddo were also given short shrift, among others.

Full disclosure time: I have, in the past, written “gawd”. I may do it in the future. Fairly soon, in fact. It’s also possible that I’m awful.

Sometimes, not often, I feel uncomfortable using the word God. Because it’s fraught with all kinds of complications and associations for me. Gawd to me is more of a saying than a reference to an all-powerful deity who may or may not exist. I’m not trying to be twee or cutesy (although maybe I am those things), I just sometimes want to be a little more linguistically playful and slightly less sacrilegious.

I like having fun with language and watching it change and get used in new ways. I get riled up by egregious spelling and grammar mistakes, and offended and appalled by racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic and anti-semitic use of language, which is still oh so very prevalent. And of course, there are certain words and phrases that just plain irritate the hell out of me. But I tend to think that says more about me than the person saying “24/7″. (It says I’m intolerant and hateful, obvs.) (She said obvs! It’ll be natch, next! Yes, yes it will. Natch.)

Last week, well-known blogger Sarah Brown (not that one) wrote a guest blog for Dooce, which, in case you can’t be bothered to click, was titled: “None of them has ever said LOL”. Ostensibly lauding her favourite Twitter users (I think Tweeple can get you killed), it was really criticising the majority of tweeters for doin. it. rong. For not making their tweets into an art form, not espousing the most witty, acerbic, entertaining insights possible, for not floating above the fray, the fray being those plebs who sometimes update more than once in an hour, or actually carry on conversations with their friends. “I wish my entire feed was people like Josh Allen (@fireland),” wrote Brown,  “who tweet once a day at most, and hit that one out of the park.”

Twitter is a way for me to stay connected to my friends and the outside world. While I try not to tweet run-of-the-mill thoughts, seeing it solely as some kind of stage on which to perform stunning acts of semantic dexterity seems both pedantic and  pretentious.

And it reminded me of a woman I know (in the sense that she’s an acquaintance of an acquaintance), who writes for a high-profile US website and who used to follow me on Twitter before I violated one of her essential Twitter rules. I didn’t know that was what I’d done until she later crowed about how if anyone mentioned their follower number, EVER, she would never follow them again. And then wrote a blog post detailing her rules just to make sure we understood how serious this was.

I understand not being thrilled with people who regularly report on their growing (or otherwise) follower count, or being sick to the back teeth of people who tweet begging for more followers by some arbitrary deadline, for no apparent reason. But there’s a simple solution to these annoyances. UNFOLLOW. Unsubscribe. Turn your head away and go back to watching Good Times and bogarting that can, man. (I don’t know how a Reality Bites reference slipped in here, except that these criticisms remind me of unwashed, too-cool-for-a-job Ethan Hawke sneering at Ben Stiller for working for The Man. (And I don’t mean his hubs.))

This is why people sometimes think top bloggers are elitist. They’re the only ones invited to certain parties at blogging conventions, and they sometimes pronounce themselves experts on what you should say and how you should say it. However tongue-in-cheek this criticism is meant, it is meant to criticise, to bring people down, to challenge really very innocuous behaviour because the cool kids want to be hip and deadpan and if they so much as see an unironic DH or hubby or Gawd it might damage their image beyond repair.

How is any of this different from pretty blonde cheerleaders laughing at the geek in “mom jeans” wearing bottle-thick glasses, or walking past the girl with unfortunate skin and coughing “pizza face!”?

Call me old-fashioned, but I think there should be an element of noblesse oblige: if you write a very popular blog and appear on TV and have been published in some impressive publications,  maybe you could cut others a little slack. Even if you don’t have a superior attitude, (and I know Dooce doesn’t, and find it hard to believe of Sarah Brown or Alice Bradley, either) if you go around slagging off other bloggers it looks smug and superior simply because of your own success. It’s kicking people when they’re down (at the bottom of the Technorati rankings).

Seeing some of these conversations unfold, I feel like I’m back at school. And I hated school. While I was never really bullied, school was where I went to get my spirit crushed and my natural exuberance flattened. I became introverted, ashamed, internalising the criticism I received for liking a certain group, or wearing my hair a certain way, or using a certain expression. I could never seem to get it right, so the logical answer must be that everything was wrong with me.

I tried to bend myself into the shape people wanted, a human pretzel. Desperate not to offend, I never made any real friends.

But I thought we’d all grown up now. Thought that after 30 we could stop making sweeping statements about people’s character in order to feel good about ourselves, or from judging people on the basis of totally superficial things. However tongue-in-cheek those judgey tweeters and “cool kids” with their internet rules may be, what they’re doing is as old as time. It’s mean girls 101. It’s divisive and depressing.

Can’t we just let each other be huge dorks if we want to be?

Does life have to be a pathetic repetition of high school forever after?

Aren’t you tired of telling and being told what to do, how to act, and what to say yet?

I mean, really.

I mean, GAWD.