Howzit? by *aengelius on deviantART

For larger picture just click it. (Which will teleport you to my DeviantArt account)

My description from DevArt.

For a Norwegian living in Cape Town, I remember being stunned by cashiers asking me “howzit?” Which in turn would make me all flustered, asking myself, “well, how am I really feeling?” It’s just a courtesy question, but despite that it still feels good to be asked this. “Hwz?”

Did this design a while back, and it has just been collecting dust on my computer until today. Just added some finishing touches here and there. Would very much like to “get it out there”, but I got a little demotivated by the printing costs.

Two questions:

Would you have bought this t-shirt? And do you have any tips for online services to sell this through?

Hey guys and gals’. Let me introduce you to my second custom Wordpress child theme based on the WP framework thematic, done for a local company called Brødrene Haukås AS. Despite a fulltime job, I’ve managed to clock in several hours of work on this project and finally it’s 99% done.

Not so much to say. I’ve already said a lot already in Norwegian about it.

Kva om me var ein annan art, du og eg, og såg på menneske som berre eit anna fasinerande dyr? Svimlande, vrimlande mengder menneske som lagar allskens ting, byter tinga for andre ting og produserar fleire av seg sjølv. Den som har mest til slutt vinn.

What if we were a different kind of species, you and I, watching humans as just another animal? Teeming, bustling crowds of people making all sorts of things, exchanging things for other things and constantly producing more of themselves. In the end the one with the most wins.

I was at a local mall earlier today. And as I was sipping my coffe, watching people pass my little island of peace (a café), a stroke of existentialism struck me and I had to jot this semi-poem down.

What is the point of hoarding all these things in our homes? From a certain perspective it might seem we’re just producing “things”, in order to trade them for other “things” produced by other people. Perhaps that’s the whole point of it, and I should just lean back and take another sip of my coffe…

*Optimistic-fascinated*

Take this as it is dear reader. It’s just my opinion. But I would be very happy if I managed to spark some new ideas in you.

The sounds we tie together and call language is something that really fascinates me in general. As I tend to spend a lot of time online, I’ve started recognizing certain concepts used in digital communication (e-mail & instant messaging) that I don’t see in regular communication (things like letter and talking). Furthermore web expressions and concepts seem to be slowly leaking into our more analogue forms of communicating. This will perhaps just be the first post of many that I do on the subject of web linguistics, despite me being woefully untrained in linguistics at all.

In my opinion web linguistics, basically the way we commicate on the web should be more appreciated as an area of study. It’s quite interesting how people on the net often jump into arguments over the way people word themselves, often because of (and in) bad grammar. People are apparantly passionate about languages, and in the rapidly changing webspace I would guess it’s not uncommon to think that language is on a path of degradation or devolution so to speak. If anything I think language is more alive than ever on the web, through our constant ‘bickering’ over grammar and experiments in ways to better efficiently express ourselves in typed words.

Expanding our toolbox with *actions*

Also noteworthy is the development of linguistic norms on the net. One example is the habit of enclosing 1. person actions in star notation like this, *action-by-me*. If I didn’t want use the form of, *yawns and stretches*, I would have had to write something like “I yawn and stretch” or “Nils yawns and stretches.” Many would perhaps say that this descriptive action notation is redundant and doesn’t add to the communication. And I would dispute that argument by claiming that this phenomenon in itself might have evolved out of a need to overcome the emotive barrier of IT.

I think I’m on to something here! *Flails arms widely at the computer*

Wikipedia: ‘Enclosing a phrase between two asterisks is used to denote an action the user is “performing” (“user: *pulls out a paper*”)’

Thankfully I’m not alone in noticing this as there are other sporadic writings on this phenomenon. A metafilter user called Tube also asks about these self-referential asterisks as he calls them.

Tube: “Most etymology questions are about words or phrases, and not novel uses of punctuation. My guess is that this is an Internet meme, probably recent, but I’m curious if anyone can give me a better answer. Was this novel usage around before the Internet?”

Good question. And another timely thing to ask is whether or not this will find its way into our more analogue forms of communicating. Maybe self-referential asterisks could become a valid tool for authors writing stories in 1. person? I would certainly think that this concept would be useful in informal letters, where you want to convey more meaning between the lines or add spontanious life to the written word.

*stares out window, pondering*