>???

It makes me feel somewhat better, having found a compatible spirit. I was frequenting a similar place, Sezam BBS stationed in Belgrade, for nine years. It was also structured into conferences and categories like UT, and moderated. The Civilization conference was actually moderated by a bunch of people; I was the sub-moderator, i.e. "minister" of language, because of the current joke that we were the "government of civilization".

The troubles I had there were quite different; having essentially no trouble with spelling (Serbian scripts are phonetic), we had all sorts of other problems, from basic illiteracy to bad habits adopted from the (communist and post-communist) political newspeak.

The majority of people in the forum were computer literate, but mostly didn't care about general literacy.

In this case, I can only offer my compassion to a colleague :)

>Hint: We already know it is your opinion because you wrote it. Unless you are a recognized expert or are actively representing a third party, there is no reason to use 'IMO'.

The accent is not in "this is my opinion", but in "this is my opinion", meaning "I only think so, didn't test it". At least, IMO.

>Maybe I wrote this because I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. But whether it is written or not, I still cringe when I see a row of question marks. It makes my teeth hurt.

What would you say about an item on the shelf, with a poster behind it with word NEW painted in screaming red and yellow, and surrounded with quotes? Is this to be taken as "allegedly new", or "someone said it was new and we quote it", or what?

Along the same lines, the TV listings channel often announces a movie called "Boxing", (title duly surrounded with quotes, as the grammar says it should be) with different actors each time. I never saw that one, but it must have a really good plot if it was remade so many times.