Tom Woodward, coming down on “the arbitrary rules of English”:

I’ve actually listened to teachers brag that they never abbreviate when texting and that they used full and complete punctuation. That pretty much says to me, “The arbitrary ‘rules’ of English are more important than its purpose. Changing styles for different purposes and media doesn’t make sense.” I can’t think of a worse lesson for a student or a worse mind set for a teacher.

Christian Rudder, analyzing over 500,000 contacts on his dating site OkCupid, noting that the same rules Tom scorns score you a date more often than they don’t:

Netspeak, bad grammar, and bad spelling are huge turn-offs. Our negative correlation list is a fool’s lexicon: ur, u, wat, wont, and so on. These all make a terrible first impression. In fact, if you count hit (and we do!) the worst 6 words you can use in a first message are all stupid slang.

The exceptional OkCupid blog is what happens when a bunch of Harvard math students decide to run a dating site. The blog doesn’t cover technical notes, release dates, or any site business at all. Instead, it offers up infographic after infographic pitched directly along my students’ hormonal wavelength.

We’ve picked over the entire blog’s offering, stopping with this astrology-debunking beauty yesterday:

Back when my dad started teaching in dickety-two, you simply couldn’t access this kind of fun so quickly or cheaply. Let’s not squander this.