The mission is terminated

typed for your pleasure on 31 October 2004, at 9.35 pm

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!

Random similar posts, for more timewasting:

At the bedside of Mistress English Language, holding her hand as she wastes away on August 7th, 2005

Operation: Mapleleaf (2008 edition) on October 22nd, 2008

4 have spoken to “The mission is terminated”

  1. Patrick writes:

    ahhhhhhhhh…say it ain’t so 🙂
    man, you’ve been spelling in that funky Genesis way since I’ve known you.
    Shit, maybe I need to learn to write complete sentences now! What a world, what a world

  2. Davecat writes:

    Yeah Patrick; I have to apologise to you and everyone else back then, who had to put up with that shit. Ye gods..

    I’d have to say that our Walter was worse than I was for a longer period of time, though.. but I would say that. 😉

  3. Patrick writes:

    Ah, I got used to it. Honestly, after a while, the alternate spellings didn’t even register with me as being odd.

  4. Penda writes:

    You pinko commie, selling out to da Man!

    Honestly, I for one am grateful.

    Not that I didn’t like the other style, since I’d been living with it for – I dunno – ever. It was like when you cut off your bunny tail . I’d gotten used to it, and despite the fact that I’d dreamed about taking a pair of pinking shears to it myself, it was still a shock when it was gone.

    Welcome to the world of us “norms” passing ourselves off as “normal”. Believe me, when you cut them off at the knees, they never see it coming – and that is priceless.

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