TMI? STFU!!!!11!1!eleven

In honor of Rick James’ passing, I would like to discuss with you my unbelievable disdain regarding your flitty grammatical catch-phrases, needlessly complicated abbreviations, unnerving verbal stops and the brethren of such lingual aberrations.

Remember as you read this that I am writing directly to you. Take as much offense as possible, because it is no coincidence that I mention something you do or say – I actually know you are reading this right now and mean to hurt you emotionally. When you email me because you, the only person who ever reads things like this on the internet, are offended that my views differ from yours and because you think that your feelings, even after I have written this horrendously personal attack on you and your quirks, will matter to me, know that I will be satisfied at a job well done before feeding it to the skinnyfilter.

When you say ‘TMI’ at me you are telling me you are a fucking ingrate. You are saying to me ‘I’ve got the self respect and personal dignity of a conch shell, and no more than that.’ You then back this impression up by actually saying ‘Too much information, man.’ Perhaps waxing acronymic holds a certain flare for you that is wholly lost on me, but you completely defeat the brevity of this lingual artifice with your accidental irony. You are giving me too much information. I suppose this plastic toothpick in the Swiss Army Knife of lingual idiocy will soon be replaced by something even more unwieldy in the near future – just as was the make-letter-l-with-thumb-and-forefinger-and-place-on-forehead sight gag you loved so very much in the late 90s; Even though you had a 60% chance of using the wrong fucking hand.

The next time you tell me that ‘It is what it is’ I am going to seriously consider mass murder as a way of life. I’ll be the Frank Castle of verbal stupidity. What the hell is the point in what you are saying? You are telling me that you have absolutely nothing of value to emit but you absolutely must issue something forth. Perhaps you are intimidated and need to have the last word. Perhaps you’ve been pretending this whole time to understand what the christ I am saying and need to make sure I get that you get it. Perhaps you hate being left out, or perhaps you looked in the mirror this morning and realized that you really don’t matter after all. Some alien fucking moon signal made it all the way through your bathroom ceiling and into your head setting off some evolutionary preset left there by those grey bastards and you had a serious moment of clarity. The rest of the day you spent making up for your loss by reminding the people around you that they, in having regular common conversation, are giving you too much information and that what they just said is in fact what they just said. If you absolutely must make that much needed impact at the end of your conversation partner’s statement I suggest replacing this ill-begotten phrase with either of the following solutions:

1. A complete repetition of the last few words whomever you are talking to just said:

“Looks like the server went down today.”

“Yeah, but you know what? It is what it is.”

Would Be:

“Looks like the server went down today.”

“Yeah, but you know what? Looks like the server went down today.”

2. A completely meaningless string of words that would mean just as much as ‘It is what it is’ but at least sound interesting:

“Looks like the server went down today.”

“Yeah, but you know what? Fiddle canister repulsor beam anisotropic Underhill falafel.”

3. Fire 3 rounds into your own head with a fairly high caliber rifle. If you need, you can use the old toe-to-trigger method. I’m not stopping you.

There was an option #4 whose contents contained something like ‘Allow maybe a single god damned second between your self important outbursts.’ or ‘Consider what your conversation partner is saying, perhaps there is meaning in his word.’ But I doubt it would’ve helped.

I was in line for a ‘Nathan Dog’ (eat only when the desire to rot from the inside out is at its most fevered pitch – I normally get 2) at the local Showcase 1billion screen ultraplex a few days back and I made a comment, in passing, to my friend, that apparently somehow betrayed my geekishness to the guy working the dog spindle. I think I attempted a terrible Sean Connery impression for, like, a single word and the kid told me how much of a complete asshat he was by tearing into an SNL skit. You know the one. I know you do because I can’t come anywhere close to mentioning Sean Connery without you performing it for me. This tells me you are a tiny person inside. That everything everyone said about you in high-school was totally true and that you have yet to learn that there is a world outside of a single episode of SNL. I am so sick of hearing this fucking sketch that it hurts my fucking soul. Shut the hell up, please. PLEASE. Stop. You sound like a moron. We’ve all heard it. Even if we’ve never seen the skit you’ve said it enough times that there are entire solar systems springing into existence on the other side of the gad damned galaxy out of the excess disdain and hatred that I can’t properly focus on a single point in space-time due to the constraints of having a fucking limit to how much of a total ass I can be toward someone I’ve never met. You, however; you want to tell me that Con Con will take ‘The Rapist’ for 200 and that, ho ho ho – No, Mr. Connery – it’s actually ‘Therapist’, a billion times.

Look: I get it. You are stuck. You are having hard times. I get it. You still sound like a fucking toolbox.

Then the kid starts with the Python. Look, I own every episode of MPFC. I have the special edition of all of the films, and yes – I know the parrot skit word for word. Inside I am just like you. Outside, though, I don’t need to repeat this shit at every possible opportunity. The fact that it is funny makes John Cleese cool, not you. Michael Palin will own until the very day he dies and you will still be serving Nathans to people who don’t care how much useless comedy you can spit out. Fuck you, Mr. Gumby.

Look, I know you have never stopped to think, not even for a second, about what you are saying. I know it never crosses your mind that saying ‘PIN number’ is like shitting yourself in public or that ‘rewind it back’ speaks of a level of misunderstanding you and our language share whose intimacy is infuriating. You can’t decelerate, as acceleration is any change in speed or direction, and – though you will fight to the fucking death that you have some sort of native understanding of the lingual structure you tear to pieces every day of your tiny little life – GIF is pronounced ‘jif’. Don’t even try to argue. Find your local college and ask an English professor about the pronunciation of acronyms. He will tell you that acronyms that are not initialisms (acronyms whose pronunciation is wholly or partly the names of constituent letters) have no defined rule set regarding pronunciation and that pronunciation relies largely on the opinion of the acronym’s creator. I don’t call you ‘Asshat’, even though you are clearly an asshat, because you weren’t NAMED ‘Asshat’.

Steve Wilhite, creator of the graphics interchange format says “Choosey developers choose GIF.” This is Steve’s way of saying you are a fucking idiot

When you come to me and tell me that ‘reiteration’ and ‘deceleration’ and ‘devolve’ are in the dictionary my immediate response will be the following:

“You are correct. So to, in the dictionary, is ‘moron’. Study this word as it will forever be what others around you will be thinking when you speak to them.”

You see, and the manufacturers of the 4 most popular English dictionaries in the world will confirm this, a dictionary’s purpose is to report definitions of words that are used and to stay objective on the correctness and/or validity of said words. It is a tool for people like me to use when trying to figure out what the hell people like you are trying to say. Your use of it as some sort of defense of your inability to correctly parse the fairly structured lattice of the language you grew up using is evidence itself that you will spend the rest of your life pulling levers for the people who had half a mind to not speak like something Dr. Mereau forgot to put down. Shit, Hyena-Swine had a better handle on what words went where and he spent 80% of his time licking himself. Its existence in the dictionary proves that monkeys like you, enough of you, say it on a regular basis. The fact that it is a misuse or just plain fucking inept has no relevance. The fact remains, though, that you saying it has no effect on its correctness. The fact that your idiot friends all agree that ‘melee’ is pronounced ‘mee-lee’ just means you have a bunch of idiot friends.

What is the law? Oh fuck it, you wouldn’t get the reference anyway.

You sound like you were born in a lead pipe filled with paint chips and you spent the last however many years you’ve blighted this land eating your way out.

As a programmer I spend 14hrs a day dealing with words and what they do when crammed together. It is my hope that someday you will come to me and try to speak your diluted Beyond Thunderdome version of English and immediately drop dead. Upon inspection I will find that you died of a fatal syntax error and I will place a comment upon your still warm corpse:

/*
Intent: Who the fuck knows.
Problem: Bad syntax. I blame his parents.
Solution: Scrap it. Write a new one.
*/