"Russian deputies try to ban LOL-speak"

Link at The Other Russia

This is some kind of elaborate joke, right?

First of all, we need to forbid anonymity on the Net: reduce the amount of sites where people act using nicknames [usernames] instead of their real names. And when users will stop hiding behind masks, their treatment of the written word will improve, because everyone knows that making mistakes is improper.

Click to expand...

Must be April fool's day in Russia.

Well, it hasn't been the April Fool's joke for the government to sue Khodorkovsky again in a way that if the government loses they'll prove both that Khod. was stealing from himself and that every person who fueled their cars at this gas stations was breaking the law.

I do, though, have to say, that "Olbanian" that the article refers to is a weird phenomenon. It has now English equivalent - it's not about abbreviations like lol - more like if people started writing "Hai" instead of "Hi". It as originally a joke over the net users' illiteracy, but by now it's a joke-on-joke-on-joke-on-... No longer funny!

Ptichka said:

I do, though, have to say, that "Olbanian" that the article refers to is a weird phenomenon. It has now English equivalent - it's not about abbreviations like lol - more like if people started writing "Hai" instead of "Hi". It as originally a joke over the net users' illiteracy, but by now it's a joke-on-joke-on-joke-on-... No longer funny!

Click to expand...

I sincerely dislike all those crazy new stuff, how people write their short messages, how they keep shortening everything etc. But how is creating a law against it useful? And to make people use their true names / identities, sounds very much like censorship to me. "We need to forbid anonymity on the Net" - come on! So if I were a Russian in Russia, I would have to chuck Medusa, give my true name here, probably including contact information like postal address, because if my orthography sucks, they will hunt me down. Why do I think that they don't care so much for the orthography, but more for the actual content of what people are writing on blogs, message boards etc.?

Medusa said:

Why do I think that they don't care so much for the orthography, but more for the actual content of what people are writing on blogs, message boards etc.?

Click to expand...

Hmmm... Let me see... Would that be because you have a brain?!

Tm