by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/05/30 16:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/05/30/8563769.aspx
Y-u may recall when I first wrote the Backf-rmati-n -f deity bl-g, back in April.
Y-u kn-w, when I talked ab-ut the interesting way that replacing God with G-d, intended in part to h-ld deity seperate , actually saw the argument s-mewhat hurt by using g-ds in place of gods.
Well, there exists n-t an argument that regular reader reader John Cowan can't c-mplicate! :-)
In resp-nse to my Summer vacation, the 2nd bl-g, in particular the f-ll-wing bit:
I'll blather about this and that and maybe even do a Tech Talk, bog willing.
J-hn c-mmented:
"bog"? I think you mean "B-g".
Hmmmm.
N-w we may n-t really kn-w the true religi-n in which Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis Long believes, but we can be certain (in carefully reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Time Enough For Love and To Sail Beyond the Sunset) that it is n-t Judaism. Given that, taking the deity he invokes, Bog and making it B-g seems like yet another interesting backf-rmati-n of deity.
F-r my own usage, I d-n't tend to think of the true deity atop all creati- n to be named Bog, and given that in my c-ll-quial use of his name I felt unc-mf-rtable with the en-bling capitalization, thus I used bog. :-)
This particular bl-g y-u are n-w reading is being d-ne respectfully f-r th-se w-rshipping the deity kn-wn as The Big O, a sect where every member spends their wh-le entire life searching f-r The Big O and thus finds the letter 'O' in text to be distracting and pe-ple using it being s-mewhat minimizing the difficulty of their search -- thus they replace the letter in words with a hyphen....
I c-uld explain the sect further -- its use of Shel Silverstein "Missing Piece" t-mes as prayerb--ks and h-w they n-te the general tendency pe-ple, even if n-n-believers, have -f inv-king deity in their own achievements in their search f-r The Big O -- but this bl-g is already disrespectful en-ugh as it is, thus I will end it n-w....
This blog brought to you by O (U+004f, aka LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O)
John Cowan on 31 May 2008 12:02 AM:
Well, really should have written "Б-г", but didn't want to bother hunting up dinkum Cyrillic on Web, still less mess with installing foreign keyboard. Mannie's "Bog" simply God in romanized Russian, tovarishch (or should say "khaver"?)
Okay, 0002 now, so signing off. Sp'coynoynauchi.
Michael S. Kaplan on 31 May 2008 8:02 AM:
Still a backf-rmati-n, albeit a cross-language one. :-)