Sunday, March 16, 2008

Orthographic reform

Perhaps one of the reasons more dogs don't blog is that the human keyboard is not designed for the larger or furrier paw. A Newfie or OES is pretty much going to have to get someone to help out with the typing, and since they can't confess to their owners their full comand of English (or whatever language they grew up pretending not to speak), they either have to hire a smaller-pawed dog (and if there isn't one conveniently in the household, it's awfully hard to manipulate your human into letting in a random Chihuahua every evening for an hour or so) or succumb to hegemonic silence. Obviously the only solution is a new, non-anthropomorphist keyboard, but until we dogs manage to take over the Dell plant (and it's so hard to coordinate these takeovers without the damn computer. Talk about about a perfect system of oppression!), I have a temporary solution. Humans, in fact, have already developed this to adjust to the difficulties of typing with their weird spindly fingers on cell phone and Blackberry keypads.

If you read human blogs, you're probably already familiar with LOL, BTW, WTF, and ROFLMAO, to name a few. What we dogs need is some acronyms which properly express our own common sayings. BTW is fine, but LOL, for example, makes no sense in dogspeak. We don't laugh out loud. We bark, but BOL is redundant--what is the point of barking to yourself? To express amusement, I propose TMHTTS--tilting my head to the side. WTF is okay for anger/annoyance, but I think a more canine-accurate expression would be FSOE--fur standing on end. As for ROFLMAO, we have the laughing problem again. I've seen plenty of dogs ROFWTB (rolling on floor wiping their butts), ROFSTHTSS (rolling on floor scratching that hard to scratch spot) and ROFDATR (rolling on floor demanding a tummy rub), but I can't imagine too many instances where one would need to communicate these to the reading public. Any suggestions from the doggy public for a better substitute?

Finally, we definitely need a quick, convenient way to explain the abrupt end to a post, extended posting silence, or shift into unintelligibility. Teenagers have POS (parent over shoulder)--we have HCH (human coming home).

I'd love to read your comments--those of you who can fit your pads onto the keys. Hopefully we can work out a solution for the bigger breeds soon, but hopefully this will make it easier for those of you on the cusp.

OK, TAFN, BTYL (bark to you later)!

1 comment:

wally said...

RMAO! The first word is roach. You can figure out the rest.

wally