Layer upon layer of meaning and information

Most of the women-in-tech list-servs I’m on have a good number of members who do not speak English as a first language. So I tend to cut them some slack when their grammar, punctuation and spelling aren’t publisher-ready.

But there was a (thankfully) short thread last week on Ada’s List (as in Ada Lovelace) in which the OP pointed out that the plural of a noun is formed by adding an “s”, not an apostrophe plus an “s”.

A lot of posters begin their emails with “Hello lovely Ada’s”. Apparently the missing comma of direct address doesn’t bother the OP. And ignore the fact that the list itself shows up in the sender’s block as “Adas List”, not “Ada’s List”.

Fair enough.

But someone who describes herself as “the pivot point between techs, designers, commercial and brand objectives, and user groups for startups” decided to weigh in. (Both OP & Ms. Pivot appear to be native English speakers, from England, for what it’s worth.) And let me just say that when someone chooses this kind of language as her face-on-the-world, you know you're in the presence of a major-league pisher.

Well.

I dunno, but it seems to me that if you’re going to attempt to, well, make a point about language, it would help if you refrained from word salad sentences, like that third graf. I mean—this is the kind of thing you might expect to overhear after watching an avant-garde one-act play off-off-Broadway, while standing amongst the vapers.

Also, in commenting on clarity of expression, which is clouded when people misuse contractions, your point is somewhat vitiated when you use the contraction of “it is” when what you probably meant was the possessive “its”. Just sayin’.

(I wonder if her shortening of communications in the last graf is ironic, given that it appears in a sentence where she proclaims that written communications should be “quite formal”? Perhaps she’s inviting us to explore her layer upon layer of meaning and information?)

I’m letting the typo on abbreviations slide; Lord knows my fingers don’t always cooperate with my brain. But I do find it interesting that she doesn’t seem to know the difference between abbreviations and contractions. An abbreviation, generally speaking, is a shortened form of a word (Dr. for Doctor, or lb. for pound [technically, a shortening of the Latin libra]), while a contraction represents the omission of one or more letters from a word or phrase by replacing it/them with the apostrophe (can’t for cannot or they’re for they are). Consequently, her pontification on “authentic patterns of speech” cracks me up.

As does referring to the “abbreviated” original phrase as its “full name” and then saying that however you want to spell stuff helps “provoke a deeply personal and genuine discourse”.

Well, at least—I think that’s what she’s saying. But truthfully, I’ll be blowed if I really understand her finely nuanced informal conversation (or, wait: it’s written, so does that make it formal?) and its constantly changing vernacular.

And I’m betting that the women on the list from Ghana, India, Colombia and Poland are with me on this.