> What's happened to you is something I like to call "Samatization." Basically your vocabulary is morphing to match Sam's.

Oh great. ;-) Blame Dave for "rule." He started it. When we roomed together, in the summer of 1995, he introduced me to the inherent humor of showing out things like, "This RULES!" and "It RULES it RULES it RULES!" "Rock" came later, for variation.

"Gah" comes from the 1947 film "Life With Father," so that one, at least, was my responsibility for bringing into RinkWorks slang.

Um. "Suck." You know, that IS an ugly sort of word, and while I admit to using it, I don't really like it. I picked it up initially because it was a humorous counterpart to "RULE." For example, when you're condensing a classic work of 19th century English literature, with beautiful, flowing prose, how hilarious is it to use the word "suck" to help sum up the gist of it? I had picked up that word before BAM, managed to minimize my use of it, then picked it up again since employing it for its comic value. "Gah."

However, there are few interjections more eloquent, concise, or beautiful than a well-placed "EEWWW," especially if it is Brunnen-G's particular variation, "EWWWHAHAHAHA," to describe something simultaneously nauseating and funny.

I think, in general, people would be surprised at the amount of interjections, grunts, and hand gestures people use to communicate meaning and tone, in place of or in support of actual words. I don't doubt that Brunnen-G uses fewer than the average RinkyDink -- Brits tend to use fewer than Americans, and when I've spoken to her over AIM talk, she seemed to have a similar mode of speech and care and regard for English words. Still, even the most articulate among us are stripped of a *surprising* amount of communicative power when all we have are 26 letters, 10 digits, and assorted punctuation marks to express ourselves with.

Written language is hardly new. People have been writing things down about as long as people have been communicating at all. But until the Internet, written communication was never significantly employed in the service of casual conversation. You write a letter, write a speech, write an essay, write an article, write a story -- in all cases, you have the luxury of deliberating over your words, referring to dictionaries and thesauri if necessary, rereading, rewriting, until the written message conveys the intended mood and meaning clearly. There's no reason for slang or transliterated interjections, or emoticons. The power is all in the words.

The message forum permits this luxury, but RinkChat does not. You can't just blurt something out and have it unambiguously convey the proper intent every time. The rumor is that Shakespeare never crossed out anything he put on paper -- even assuming that were true, I bet he took more time to think about what he wanted to say than we have the luxury to take in a real-time conversation.

And so interjections and emoticons are simply a fact of real-time casual conversation in ASCII. Some still manage to be more eloquent than others -- Brunnen-G has always struck me as one of them, and the Ice Storms archive didn't even trigger the question of whether that opinion should change -- but the fact of the matter is that without the easy use of interjections and/or emoticons to qualify and clarify the tone behind the meaning of certain words, AND to convey emotions that would, in person, not be expressed AT ALL except by body language, you're probably not going to be an effective communicator in an online chat room.

And so I do not agree with those who disparage the use of smileys and exclamations and so forth, saying they wrongfully take the place of legitimate English words. A public speaker resorts to the same sort of "crutches" when speaking -- vocal inflections, hand gestures, timing, tone of voice.

In fact, in spite the rampant use of emoticons on the Internet, and generally subliterate ahX0r t41k!!!!! the nation's literacy rate, last I checked, is rising in proportion with the growth of the Internet. Maybe it'll dip down again once Internet bandwidth grows enough to accommodate sites that look more like television than magazines. But for the meantime, forcing people to communicate with written words, interjections and emoticons notwithstanding, seems to have a pretty positive impact on average literacy rates.