[FAQ][INFO] alt.folklore.urban style-guide
Simon Slavin
Eclecticism
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Are you just about to post an urban legend ?
Have we heard this one ?
It's been a long September.
But I recall Spring.
alt.folklore.urban doesn't exist to collect urban legends, it exists
to discuss them. Giving us the details allows us to track the spread
of the story and note where the different variations were formed. In
return we can probably tell you if the story's true or not and how it
got started.
So we probably have heard your story -- any number of times -- but
if you can give us details of where and when you encountered it please
post it anyway. It might contain slightly different details from the
versions we know. It might have a name/address/phone number which had
been stripped-off of the ones we've seen. It might have spread out of
the area we're used to seeing it in. We love discussing this stuff:
it gives us something to do besides flame each-other.
You don't have to give names and exact dates: you could say that you
heard the story in Indiana from your hairdresser last week, and that
your hairdresser heard it from her brother who also lives in Indiana.
Another poster might report that the legend was heard frequently when
he was at school in Austria during the mid-1980s.
Impressionism
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Read the FAQ before posting.
The FAQ for alt.folklore.urban is, logically enough, archived at the
AFU archive site (<http://www.urbanlegends.com>), and a slightly
out-of-date version is posted monthly to the group.
Read news.announce.newusers before posting to any newsgroup. Please
turn HTML off for posts to any newsgroup: HTML belongs on web pages.
If you want to know if AFU has discussed a certain subject before,
try searching www.dejanews.com. Probably the easiest way is to to
do a DejaNews powersearch on the group. Point your web browser at
<http://www.dejanews.com/home_ps.shtml>
put 'alt.folklore.urban' in the 'forum' field and the rest should be
obvious. This may allow you to answer questions like "Is <this> an
urban legend ?" without having to post and wait for the responses.
Before you post to AFU, did you search the archive site ? It
includes search-engines which allow you to search DejaNews, the
archive site and/or the FAQ. There are many other good UL sites:
try a web search.
The AFU archive site carries no advertising; creates no cookies. It
requires no registration, no Java, no JavaScript, no browser plugins,
no minimum display-size or colours, no wife, no horse, no moustache.
Read the FAQ before posting.
Fauvism
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Posts to AFU contain un-PC language. Words like 'shit' and 'fuck' are
spelled correctly. While insults like 'nigger' and 'kike' are to be
avoided except when they're referents, 'black' and 'jew' (sometimes
capitalized) are frequently used as characteristics and not as insults.
Call a spade a spade, but if you're referring to someone with black
skin be prepared to prove that no insult was present, giving the
etymological and sociological background to your use of the word.
Naturalism
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Don't play the man. Don't even play the ball. Play the game.
Spelling flames are lame. To take someone to task for a trivial
mistake when it's obvious what they mean just annoys people. If you
think the person would profit by correction it's polite to do it in
privacy: using email. Showing them up in public is pointlessly rude,
and we prefer posts that have a point.
Some of the regular posters occasionally include a couple of diliberate
mistakes in there posts. It allows us to distinguish the lame-brained
from the laudable and the quick-witted from the quibblers. If you post
just to point out such errors you will probably be directed to the FAQ
on the assumption that they don't understand the spirit of the group.
Such obvious errors are sometimes used as a shibolleth.
This is not an invitation to be lazy about the spelling in your posts:
laziness in spelling is often associated with laziness in thinking.
But if you slip up on a difficult or obscure matter and your meaning is
still clear, a polite poster will respond to the spirit rather than to
the letter of your post.
Symbolism
---------
Most of the acronyms coined by people writing in electronic fora are
considered unsuitable for use on AFU: if you can't be bothered to type
it in full it's cliched and not worth typing. AFU indulges itself in
just a few, mostly group-specific, acronyms:
AFU - alt.folklore.urban
AOL - a large US-based ISP
BOA - ban on acronyms
FAQ - frequently asked questions -- often including answers
FOAF - friend of a friend (occasionally seen as FOAFOAF, etc.)
ISP - organisation which provides connection to the Internet
JHB - author of some books on ULs -- see the FAQ
L - roughly that date (e.g. 1970s L == sometime in 1965-1985)
OED - Oxford English Dictionary (with supplements if you wish)
OED2 - the second edition of the OED
TAFKAC - <http://www.urbanlegends.com>
TWIAVBP - "This may happen differently in other parts of the world."
UKoGBaNI - United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
UL - urban legend
URL - net-pointer
It's okay to use any word or acronym defined inside your post, defined
earlier in the thread (though an occasional recap can be useful) or
mentioned in a big dic. 'Big dic' is generally agreed to refer to any
large single-volume dictionary of the English language. The OED is
considered to be a huge dic and not every reader of the group has
access to a copy, so if you use an acronym or word that's that obscure
it's best to define it.
In-joke and in-acronym explanations:
L -- Lasnerian
A reference to a certain Mr. Lasner who exhibited an inaccurate
grasp of the calendar. While the inspiration for the term involved
precision but inaccuracy, use of this reference to the original
means that the user considers the date or dates quoted imprecise.
TAFKAC -- The Archive Formerly Known As Cathouse
AFU's archives used to be kept at a site called 'cathouse.org'.
Many frequent posters wish to commemorate and perpetuate this name
in gratitude to those who maintained this site and in the memory
of its excellence. The use of this appellation is not intended to
denigrate the excellence of the archives which preceded or follow
Cathouse or those people who maintained or maintain them.
TWIAVBP -- The World Is A Very Big Place
"CAESAR: Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and
thinks that the customs of his tribe and
island are the laws of nature."
-- George Bernard Shaw,
_Caesar & Cleopatra_
Derek Tearne claims to have devised this term (but not the acronym
for it) in 1992 Lasnerian.
I'm not quite sure how to pronounce 'TWIAVBP', but if you make the
assumption that the way things are done in your city is the way
they're done all over the world, any 'TWIAVBP' you see in responses
to your post should be pronounced 'idiot'. You can avoid such a
reaction by noting that TWIAVBP yourself, e.g.
> Here in Indiana we call them both tornados, but TWIAVBP and
> it seems some people would distinguish between the two and
> call them by different names."
Many of the frequent posters to AFU have been reading the group
literally for years and have a great deal of shared-experience.
Consequently AFU has a metric butt-load of in-jokes. If you lurk
for a couple of weeks before posting you'll notice and figure-out
most of them.
Pointillism
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"Cut out all the exclamation marks. An exclamation mark
is like laughing at your own joke."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Personally I feel that one should be allowed an exclamation mark
occasionally, but
"Most people here can see a joke at 10 postings. No need
to remind them what humor is."
-- George Cayro
The use of uninterrupted series of punctuation marks, including
emoticons (smilies, frownies, etc.) and repeated exclamation marks
is discouraged:
"A smiley adds nothing except an assumed lack of faith in
your own discourse or condescension for your readership."
-- Don Whittington
"Emoticons are a crutch, allowing readers and writers to
be lazy in extracting meaning from the written word. If
the trend continues, mankind is doomed to a permanent
disability to communicate on any but the most blatant
levels."
-- Steve Devaux
If you feel that your use of English is so bad that you need a series
of exclamation marks or an emoticon to make your point, give us all a
treat and spend a little more time on expressing your point in clear
(and perhaps amusing) English.
AFU will assume you to be intelligent and witty and to have a compre-
hensive command of English until you prove otherwise, so some posters
will assume that a sustained burst of punctuation is the result of a
faulty modem or badly-configured Internet software.
One typical Usenet use of punctuation deserves a mention: the use of
asterisks to replace vowels (or, less usually, any letter) in a common
word. This is done to avoid attracting the attention of people who
scan all newsgroups eagerly looking for an opportunity to start a
'discussion' about certain subjects. AFU is not interested in threads
about g*n c*ntr*l, c*rc*msc*s**n, or other 'religious' subjects except
for how they figure into urban folklore. Even if a post on such a
subject has urban folklore content, it is not welcome if it includes
argument or opinion about such things.
Expressionism
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If your first AFU post doesn't follow the style-guide but does conform
to netiquette, nothing bad will happen to you except that people will
email you with advice, ignore you or insult you. New posters are not
discouraged -- but clueless posters are. This document emits clues.
Pointers
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Two acronym servers, which expand both general and specifically
Usenet-related acronyms, can be found at
<http://www.mtnds.com/af> and
<http://www.ucc.ie/info/net/acronyms/index.html>
An early Ban On Acronyms post (in case you thought I was making it up):
<http://www.urbanlegends.com/afu/guides/afu_boa.html>