Glad you're back and thanks for the note earlier.

Like you, a white background person, I've found the easiest way around the opaque black mail message box is to move your cursor up to the top of the pane, depress the left click button and slowly drag the cursor down to the bottom of the pane. The text turns blue and the text turns black. Sort of like the effect an oven's heat does for your homemade lemon juice "invisible" ink when you're 8 or 9. Maybe there's another way to read messages without shifting back and forth between white and black backgrounds. My hit-and-miss approach found something that worked so I've stuck with it.

But to more important matters: interesting way of looking at these two cultural dialects. Val I understand enough about (or perhaps I've been subjected to it so often) that it scarcily even irks in spoken exchange. Just inured, I suppose. But having to read in in actual type can serve as an emetic more powerful than (what's that shit you got to keep in the medicine chest when you've got little ones who might eat rat poison or Lithium?) Ipecac, that's it! Written Val is far stronger stuff. It stings along the lines of battery acid in a busted knuckle.

I noticed this more than ever before late last night when a Brinkster Prankster had had some fun with my week-old Face Book page. (I know, I know: if I have a FB page I've only gotten my due.) but this prank involved changing my avatar portrait into a close-up shot of the horrifying vile and deeply disturbing head of the grotesque early-50s mannequin called Happy Boy. If you've never seen Happy Boy, praise Jesus and don't go looking for him and NEVER allow a pregnant woman in the same building with any image of Happy Boy, because he makes Thalidomide seem like the placebo.

Here's exactly how my sister-in-law (well-educated, well-to-do Pasadena modest mansion stay-at-home Mom) began a late-night note to me:

OMG..."okay"...no...OMG...."okay"...LOL...th atpicture is so totally YOU!!!!!

This is how she writes. Not a stupid woman by any means. She probably can recall right off the top of her head who won the Peloponnesian War and, frankly, I cannot. I think it was probably Greece but for the life of me I can't recollect what pissed the Hawaiians off so bad in the first place.

Need I point out that the ellipses note nothing deleted, they are there because they are ellipses. Written Val can lead to two-headed goats and snakes with hind legs. Written Val is an atrocity aimed directly at all of mankind. But still, I think I comprehend it.

I'm on much thinner ice when it comes to Fagspeak, mainly, I suppose, because it's my observation that this virus has already mutated many times. There's most definitely a young academic ostensibly straight man's Fagspeak, but I think that maybe has more to do with its use as pussy bait. And maybe it works; I've tried enough plugs and lures that work well enough to have failed to experiment with this one. I tend to thing that this stripe of the dialect may have something to do with Metro-Sexuality, if that still exists. I think I maybe read that it does not, in fact, exist any longer. Probably a vaccine or one of those other miracles brought to us by those kindly folk at Pfizer, I'd be willing to bet.

Seems to me that current Fagspeak is exactly what your title implies. It taps on the old socially acceptable mincing feyness of the academic (privilege to have had the money and time to become well-educated) adds a dollop of old world backstage tomfoolery, rips a chapter from the Brits who love a good poofster larf, Bizarrely, I think maybe it all might boil down to a new and improved pussy bait. Might work. I've tried enough plugs and lures that I've settled on a couple reasonably likely to succeed models, And ain't nothing wrong with good old-fashioned live bait.

But all being said and done, I'd go along with the privilege bit hovering above all its possible uses. Think of the languor of current Fagspeak. It not-very-subtly suggests disposable time, disposable income and all-inclusive sensitivity.

And an already disposed-of imagination.

Welcome back, Captain Pissgums.

Can't say I agree with most of it. The great thing about the English language (keeping in mind that I'm not a quick study of the other flavors readily available to me) is how much variety is available. The burgeoning population brings with it a diversity ranging from your Brooklyn charmer to the weird nasality of the Michiganer to the languid lento rumble of Mr. Weeyums and so forth unto the homogenous end of it all. This has already begun: the drift toward sameness in dialect. The genteel southern jello mold is flattening out by short paces into a Fruit Rollup of little deviance from the folks back North. Might have a lot to do with the amount of folks back North dropping kids out of their wombs and Chevys and taking up residence in da Souf. But Valspeak? T'warn't no fault of Frank's. The kids in Moon Unit Zappa's school were talking like that before the hit single made its way to the center of the charts. Turns out Moon was ostracized in her school for making fun of all the Valley Girls, and they were cruel harlots behind their strange parlance. He might've been amused by its proliferation, but he was already convinced that the race was mostly doomed. Yeah, I'm a fan. But I'm also a fan of yours, Dan Stuart. Consider that Fagspeak in a very hetero way. What are you wearing, anyway?

It's just odd that what was once considered vapid is now the voice of the over-educated. It also is cross ethnic... witness the playwright Young Jean Lee. I find Fagspeak soothing but Valspeak is like an over priced tapas bar in a strip mall... just plain annoying. As for Frank, it's Alice C who really needs to be reevaluated and rescued from his self imposed Paradise Valley purgatory.

Hey Dan, Nice to see you!!

Valspeak I am not too familiar with, least I dont think I am. Cant get with the upspeak in Valspeak personally, something I have noticed has grown enormously over here as my own 2 girls have grown older. Its actually saturated across all media.

"Then I went out to see if THE MILKMAN WAS DELIVERING, and oh my god HE WAS RIGHT ON MY DOORSTEP?" from a low E up to a B.........and turning a sentence into a question. Thats what really pisses me off, when the sentence is not a fucking question.

Fagspeak? I spent many years working with many men in services which supported men with challenging behaviour.................that was as far back as 95, my first stint. I found myself soon slipping into that predominant staff speak, just those subtle inflections and often then much more. didnt bother me in any way. With you H on the English language, but can only really relate to Spanish (and I havent been out there for nearly 2 years), that has variety. Of the sheer complexity and flavours of peoples belief`s, sexualities, cultures, political views in the planet et al and on and on.......Good subject to turn some thought to, provoking stuff to chew on.
best
xp

I was all like...SO...right on! when I first read this.

I was all like...SO...right on! when I first read this.

reno rides again-is he back in the valley?

Davo, when people say THE valley, I think San Joaquin not San Fernando. And yes I've been spending alot of time serving subpoenas, doing court searches and such down and around Shaky Town. I have to really watch the Dudespeak.

So...do you think you could like delete that duplicate comment for me brohiem?

There's a nice arc from Spicoli to Lebowski...

I'm slow. Bear with me. Spicoli is married to one of those dogs or butterflies, right? And Lebowski is that odd (and very rude, I might add) chick who took all those pictures of Linda Ronstadt in black-and-red undergarments for RS back when Jaaaaahhhhhn Wenner was het?

Too much for me. I'm still trying to figure out why the Hawaiians remained so pised off as to forever fuck up as simple as pizza.