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In recent times, my brother and I decided to establish a tradition of using as many amazingly awkward Norwegian phrases as if they made equal sense in English as possible. One in particular I like is the word we have for domestic; the inside-country.
Now there is nothing wrong with this notion, but logically, if leads to the notion of the outside-country. This is actually used to describe issues that relate to the opposite of domestic, like, say foreign policies. To make it even better, we refer people not from the inside-country, as inhabitants of the outside-country. Confused? You shouldn’t be. It’s the kind of geographically simplifying notion you’d expect from the here be dragons crowd. I am simply an outlander to you, and if you took the only member of the opposite sex that is willing to associate with me (and is not above 40) hostage, you would actually be able to use the phrase:
Outlander! We have your woman!
(sp4-16)
Ahem. Today, on the other hand is one of those rare events that for some tenuous reason I have deserved to receive outlander mail. These reasons (and I use plural lightly here) are not forgetting family birthdays - which has actually become impossible with the advent of gcal. Anyway, these are the only things in the mail I get that does not want my money and they help maintain the very bloodied illusion of a thriving social life. The fact that in the last month, all my text messages came from two senders, and that one of them was orange, should be a good indication of how near extinct this illusion actually is.
I am getting to the point of my story now. Whenever my mail has been written by a person over 60, it is almost always indecipherable to me and any of my friends that I have asked. It is probably generation gap resulting from not being taught fancy handwriting properly in school (or that all my friends are also male), but when I look down at this eldritch font that they always use, I think to myself; this is the stuff old people would need to use if they ever wanted a section of the internet for themselves. Imagine a CAPTCHA, OCR-hard, but also indecipherable to young people. It would be epic (for them). If it ever is invented, let it be known that I first named it!
In the mean time, I use my own 60+ deciphering software I found on gtalk. It’s called mum.
