Although I wouldn’t call myself Pagan, as I feel that I’ve not studied enough of it to call myself one, I’d say that per capita, Pagans are more sensible than those who follow christian-based dogma. But I would say that.
So today is Samhain, the Pagan New year! And this year’s Samhain marks a vaguely special occasion for me, as I will no longer be spelling words in that ‘pseudo-Genesis P-Orridge’ fashion anymore. Yes, from now on, I’m spelling like a *gasp* normal person. No more ‘ov’ for ‘of’, no more.. gods, well, that’s about it, really, now that I think of it.
First of (man, that’s gonna take some getting used to) all, since this Blog is still relatively new, you’ve never really experienced the full horror of What Used To Be My Spelling Style. I began my alternate spelling back around 1991 as a tribute to one of my favourite bands of all time, Throbbing gristle. Chris Carter, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter ‘Sleazy’ Chistopherson, and their ostensible front-man, Genesis P-Orridge, were four art-terrorists from Manchester back in the mid-to-late Seventies, who could well be held responsible for starting the whole Industrial music & culture scenes. They were practical philosphers, they were influential trendsetters, they were artists & musicians, they were perverted deviants. They were, and still are, entirely ace.
One of their main goals was to ‘subvert from within’; meaning, transmitting non-mainstream thoughts, ideas, and concepts to the masses using mainstream methods. They maintained that just because you were brought up to think and behave in a certain way, that you didn’t have to stick with it for your entire life, especially if it wasn’t producing the desired results for you. One of Genesis’ early experiments was to transform his spelling style into something entirely ‘other’; and, being the big slobbering TG fanboy that I was at the time, I thought it would be a good idea to follow suit. Allow me to run thru some of my past writings and lay some examples on you:
Referring again to the above statement made by Mr LaVey, he says, ‘Artificiality is more than completely honest; it forestalls disappointment at things not being what they appear to be.’ W/ Artifice, wot you see is truly wot you get. However, knowing beforehand that you’ve aquired something Synthetik, it also becomes the best possible excuse for stretching yr imagination to its fullest extent, because if yr’e anything like me, yr dream/phantasy life is much more preferable to yr waking life.
Heh. I had hoped to cite more examples by pulling from some of my older fiction, but as I still don’t have a copy of MS Word 2000, I can’t open any of my files, which were saved on the screechingly obsolete MS Works 98. Goddamn you, Micro$quish, and your stupid .wps extensions. :-\
Needless to say, my writing was a lot more impenetrable back then; the above example is when I was just beginning to curtail my unusual spelling. In my ‘heyday’, the pronoun ‘I’ would be spelt as ‘E’; a ‘y’ at the end of a word would be swapped out with ‘ie’; an extra ‘e’ was added at the end of ‘the’; most all words containing a hard ‘c’ had it spelt with a ‘k’ instead — but not if the ‘c’ was the first letter in said word, so I’d spell ‘contact’ as ‘contakt’; if the word ended in ‘ve’, I’d drop the ‘e’, etc etc. As you suspect, this was a lot of work to keep up with! It was interesting, and definitely distinctive — people on the various BBSes and Forums that I’d populate would instantly know it was me whenever I posted — but after doing this for around a decade, I think I’ve pretty much had enough. Not to mention the fact that I am a rather high-ranking spelling & grammar Nazi, so even though I knew that my alternate spelling was incorrect (and I still justify it by saying that only when you know what the rules are, then you can break them), but I’m sure to many people it seemed hypocritical.
Happy Hallowe’en! Normal spelling from Davecat, for now, and forever! Not counting when I spell like a person from the UK, ov course…
Whoops! Mea culpa!
