Comments

  1. Dennis says

    I seriously dislike disemvowelment. I would rather assassins be dispatched to the offending poster’s home than have their post disemvoweled (or, I guess the post could just be removed…) Disemvowelment just means that I am neurotically compelled to sit and try to decipher a comment for 12 times as long as it would have taken me to read it with the vowels included, AND these posts are never worth my time, anyway! So frustrating!

    I can’t stop being crazy, can’t you help me?

  2. llewelly says

    I see you signed your name in the non-Euclidean runes of the Old Ones, a rare sight this far from the sunken city of R’lyeh.

  3. says

    Disemvowelment is what I do the first few times; if they don’t get the message and are persistent, they get entered into the blacklist and automatically junked.

    Those who mock my handwriting may face even more severe penalties.

  4. says

    Dennis, I do the same thing! I’ve generally found, though, that if I don’t get a word near-immediately, I can move on and still understand the comment. Perhaps worth trying.

    (I sort of enjoy it, though. It’s like a puzzle! But I’m known for being strange that way.)

  5. says

    What do you call that peeling motion with your index fingers while going “shame shame shame”?
    Censure or rebuke?

  6. John Danley says

    Everyone get ready for Dawkins on O’Reilly this Monday on FOX. For Darwin’s sake, help us all…

  7. Robert says

    Ok, I have to admit, its actually kind of fun to write without vowels… or maybe I’m just sick…

  8. Ex-drone says

    I am an amoderatist. I don’t believe that there is an old bearded man somewhere out in the ethernet with his omnipotent finger on the delete button. Comments become disemvowelled due to alphabetic drift and eventually disappear from a blog because of selection pressures. Don’t try to impose your administrationist beliefs on me.

  9. says

    What do you call that peeling motion with your index fingers while going “shame shame shame”?
    Censure or rebuke?

    I call that Admonish. It’s one of the first powers granted on the list. :)

  10. Stv_C (Sclr ltst) FCD says

    shld b dsmvwlld fr cnsstntly trcs prfrdng nd dtng. t’s wh ‘m n rt drctr nt cpywrtr.

  11. Drekab says

    Disemvowelment…

    You’re doing that PZ!!!! I thought you were being attacked by a group of very annoying trolls. Now I feel like an idiot. /shakes fist

  12. Hexatron says

    Well, Hebrew is almost always written disemvoweled. So it is only fitting that those closest to god write in a manner closer to god’s own language.

    And it’s easier to read than disemconsonentment
    (A i eaie o ea a ieooee)

  13. says

    You guys are missing half the fun. I added a new feature to the stylesheet, and in the future, in addition to disemvoweling, I’ll be able to set the background…and you can too!

    This is what you get if you type

    <blockquote class=”creationist”> some text &lt/blockquote>

    It’s true — you can now have gumbies as a background to your quotes, just the thing for putting your obnoxious fellow commenters in their place and letting them know what you really think of what they said!

    Obnoxious people who require disemvoweling will also get this in the future:

    <blockquote class=”jerk”> nc sntmnt, hh? </blockquote>

  14. says

    Yeesh…they look really ugly on the dark background my comments get. I’m going to have to fix that later.

    Since the tag? Wow. You really don’t like html, do you? (if you were trying to smuggle in somthing nasty like a blink tag, those get filtered out.)

  15. CalGeorge says


    They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
    They pursued it with forks and hope;
    They threatened its life with a railway-share;
    They charmed it with smiles and soap.

  16. MikeM says

    Seriously, though, PZ, I heard that piece on NPR the other day where they were talking about the Sierra case. I’ve sort of been tossing around my head the idea of starting a blog on “The Church of Really Bad Stuff”, but actually, I think the Skeptics Annotated may make my idea redundant.

    But then I think about the increasing lack of civility on blogs (seen it here, seen it there, and now it’s making news broadcasts, for Pete’s sake), and I wonder why I’d even open myself up to stacks of hate mail.

    I wouldn’t put an email address out there, because, frankly, I wouldn’t want to read the boxes of spam you must get. And I wouldn’t have the time to delete abusive posts. I do have a job. Sort of.

    So what would you say to someone who’s thinking about it, but then remembers Dave Scot, jason, the physicist, etc, and says, “Nah, never mind.”?

    It’s no longer for the faint-hearted; it’s barely for the strong-hearted.

    What are your thoughts?

  17. says

    !!PZ אני כותבת בעברית בבלוג של

    Take the vowels out of that! *grin* There are a few, if you know what you’re looking at.

  18. uncle bob says

    I’m thinking you kids won’t be too disabled, if your
    disavowlment leaves your “cajones” intact, huh?

  19. Chakolate says

    Okay, it’s just me, I know. But the phrase is ‘Know all men by these present’ not ‘by these presents’.

  20. octopod says

    You should make the gumbies background darker; it’s a bit difficult to see what’s going on there. Just a shade or two.

    And maybe you could make the BOOT TO THE FACE always show up as the full graphic? That’d be awesome.

  21. Marine Geologist says

    Interrobang @ 36, Technically speaking modern Hebrew has no vowels although the aleph, yud, vav and ayin in that sentence are pronounced like English vowels.

  22. David Harmon says

    The gumby background seems to be obscuring the boxed post numbers in #31 and #32. In constrast, the “jerk” background in #34 instead partly underlies the boxed number. The box and number are visible, but the box’s field is part-gray and part white. I’m using Firefox 1.5 on OpenBSD.

  23. Chris says

    Blockquotes have always partly underlain the boxed numbers (well, for “always” = “as long as boxed numbers have been around here”). The behavior putting the gumby background on top is new, though. (Or maybe it’s just that the old background was transparent, therefore you could see through it whether it was on top or not.)

    Is it just me, or is the jerk background dark enough to make it difficult to read the text on top of it? That seems like a no-no. Also, it repeats vertically but not horizontally, which is ungraceful if you are running at high screen resolution since it only takes up maybe 1/3 of the width of the quote window.

    Even stranger: when I scroll, the gumbies background remains fixed while the window it is in scrolls over it; the jerk background moves with its window.

    Oh well, one nifty special background is better than zero.

  24. David Marjanović says

    The backgrounds are completely white in Safari (and underlie the numbers). I need to go home and watch it in the almighty MSIE.

    In Hebrew, like in Arabic, long vowels are written as the closest-sounding consonants, only short vowels are omitted — except that (like many Arabic dialects) spoken Hebrew doesn’t distinguish long and short vowels anymore, so you have to learn the spelling by heart, and I’ve read mistakes are very common in Israel.

  25. David Marjanović says

    The backgrounds are completely white in Safari (and underlie the numbers). I need to go home and watch it in the almighty MSIE.

    In Hebrew, like in Arabic, long vowels are written as the closest-sounding consonants, only short vowels are omitted — except that (like many Arabic dialects) spoken Hebrew doesn’t distinguish long and short vowels anymore, so you have to learn the spelling by heart, and I’ve read mistakes are very common in Israel.