As I don't know, or really wish to know, what all the three letter acronyms are I now ignore any posts with them in. No loss to myself or the poster of them
UK meaning of socialise: "to spend time when you are not working with friends or with other people in order to enjoy yourself: I tend not to socialize with my colleagues." So not shopping, government offices etc.
I’d say in our local Co-op that shopping and socialising can occur at the same time. For example the chap on the till is the son of the old lady who lives next door to my old next door neighbour so I can ask how she is getting on these days and has she found anyone to buy her car yet etc etc. The lady who stocks the shelves goes to the same hospital as me and we can compare notes on each others’ maladies. In a small place socialising is easy.
I do not give a jot for good English or bad English but it is the modern use of Acronyms that gets my dander up. I have no idea what they mean. It took me months to work out what OH meant.
When I first joined another garden forum in 2008, people sometimes put LOL after their replies to me ... I thought it stood for 'lots of love' and I couldn't understand why they'd say that to me, I thought they were just being friendly
How do you define bad English though? English that's different to what you were taught at school, or English with a fair number of non-standard words, such as dialect words, words relating to a profession or a particular community.
@Michael Hewett I seem to remember Tony Blair falling for the LOL thing Just to drive you further round the bend, a Canadian friend of mine also uses ROFLOL = rolling on floor laughing out loud. I'm still trying to work out the gender acronyms - LGBT is fine but what actually does the Q+ stand for ? Is the Q for questionable when someone is simply unsure which applies to them in either a physical or mental sense ? As for the +, I'm a bit stumped.
Q stands for 'Queer' doesn't it? The '+' baffles me, too. I guess it means any individual who doesn't fall into one of the LGBTQ categories, but who isn't 'cis female' or 'cis male'.
I've never understood why you need an L and a G, being gay isn't sex dependent so why create another division? It's the same as homosexual, which I thought meant you were attracted to your own sex, so why is it pretty exclusively used to describe men only? I'm from a generation where most don't have a problem with however you describe yourself bit if it's confusing for us, I'm sure it's far harder for older folk who don't have anyone affected by it in their orbit.
