maskormenace | 002 || voice

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002 || voice

Where I'm from, "righteous" means both "morally upright" and "amazing; excellent", but you're not gonna find that last one in a dictionary. A while ago, I talked to someone who understood the word as the first meaning, but not the second.

I've also had to tell people what some of the swear words I'm used to hearing mean. [Nothing like telling your seven-foot-tall robot friend about swearing, right?] And they've got swear words that I don't get either.

I guess the point of this is: what's slang like in your world? What's swearing like in your world? Would you know what I was talking about if I said fuck or asshole, or would we have to have a very awkward talk about that?

[A pause, then:] I'd also love to hear a sample, if you've got some.

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[There's a laugh. It's definitely not the first time he's met someone out of time here, but it amuses him to meet someone from basically right around the time he was born.]

Still pretty 80s. I mean, the early 90s was basically a continuation of the 80s anyway, with all the bad fashion choices and the Valley Girl speak.

The fashion wasn't that bad, come on. You whippersnappers just have no taste. [Said the seventeen-year-old to the actual doctor.

A pause, then:] But yeah, I can't argue with you over the Valley Girl speak. I mean, Jesus.

[Veronica, your mean girl is showing.]

[Sarcasm:] You're right. Fanny packs and shoulder-pads were so totally where fashion was at. We've got to bring those back. Unironically.

But look, if you thought Valley Girl was bad, and it's bad--just wait until the early 2000s when the internet REALLY gets going. God. Chatspeak. [With a fakey enthusiastic falsetto] Oh-Em-Gee! El-Oh-El!

...that's a good idea. I'll go tell my boss to incorporate fanny packs and shoulder pads into our next displays, it'll be so very.

[She's kidding, actually.]

Oh-Em—that's oh my god, right? It can't be that hard to type a few extra letters. And what does El-Oh-El even mean?

El-Oh-El is "laugh out loud." You'd add it to a text message to suggest you found something funny... or whenever you might want to express amusement--sincere, sarcastic, or otherwise.

So, OMG, LOL—any other examples? [She pauses.] Just out of curiosity.

Let me think, because there's probably a million of them I use without even thinking about it and they're so ingrained in our cultural and vernacular lexicon, it takes a minute to remember what the fuck they all are.

Yeah, ok, there's one. WTF. What the fuck.

You'd also probably get mileage out of IDK [...my bff Jill] which is: I don't know.

That's barely scratching the surface, but. Important question: has anyone yet introduced you to emojis?

OMG, WTF, IDK, LOL. [Newt you may have just created a monster.] That's like a whole sentence in itself. You could smash acronyms together and they'd still make sense.

[This is changing her life right now holy shit.]

Emo-what now? This is the first I've ever heard of them.

[Well, good, because he loves monsters]

Seriously, when message posting systems limited you to 150 letters or something, you learned to string as many abbreviations and acronyms together as you could. Kids used to substitute numbers in, too, so you'd get things like G R and then the number eight, and that gave you the word "great" while saving you two characters. The word "you" became the letter "u." Punctuation was often lost. Things were shorthanded.

Anyway! As for emojis. They're usually faces or some other kind of icons to express a thought or emotion. Just a second.

[Switches to text]

I mean, there's oldskool:
:-) :) :( <3

the simple classics: 😊 ❤ 😍

but the phones got all kinds of weird, with hands clapping, thumbs up...basically any tiny image you could ever think to need.