Apostrophes and Hyphens

I'm still working on my noticeboard. Had chosen the dark brown material by the way. And now what I need to do is fill it up and paste it up the ugly wall.

Don't worry, I will sure show off you in my blog one.

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Note: This post is not written against anyone particular.

This entry will offend 25 "friends" from my Friendster. Yes, I'm that jobless counting it. Well, not a difficult task for someone who only have 332 "friends". =p

I don't know for you but... I find putting apostrophes, hyphens or any weird combination of letters (example: xox or oOo) in front and behind nicknames very annoying.

Imagine, you want to find a "friend" with the name... erm.. let's say XYZ lar. And so you skipped to the last page thinking that since the name started with the letter "X". Then you realized it's not there.

How? You have no choice but browse page by page with your eyes staring at every inch of the monitor just to make sure you won't miss it.

And there, found it.

Instead of putting the nick as XYZ, your try-to-be-unique-and-cool friend put '''- (XYZ) - ''' just to be different from others.

What the heck?

I'm sorry but I totally don't get it.
What? Is there such competition as the "Friendster's Funkiest Nick"?

Look at the below picture,

(... which is obviously not my list, that's why I need to blur their face out)

How kiasu can these people be? I counted, the first "friend" on the list has 4 apostrophes with spaces in between before her nick followed by the second "friend", who has 8 apostrophes.

What is all this about? The Battle of Apostrophe?

(The above cartoon was drawn by me using MS Word, not bad huh?)

The reason why I made it looked like a war among ladies was because I noticed the majority of those who made an effort to edit their nicks are females.

* * *

Other than apostrophe, the second most frequent used punctuation mark in Friendster nicks are.... (cue drum rolls) "Hyphen"! *clap clap clap*

I think the reason is the same, those who used it preferred to stay in "Page 1" of their friends' lists.

* * *

According to this website,

An apostrophe is a symbol that indicates that some letters have been omitted from a word (for example, "do not" can be written as the contraction "don't"). Apostrophes are also used to show possession (for example, Jane's doll means a doll belonging to Jane).

and,

The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join or to separate words. Some examples of hyphenated words are: merry-go-round, light-blue, twenty-four, and re-entry.

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So, which letter(s) from there in your nick, or name was/were omitted and possessed it?

(Example: ' XYZ ' )

And which part of your nick/ name need to be joined? All I can say is, your nick is incomplete missy/ mister. I thought I saw a lot of broken links there.

(Example: - XYZ - )

For those who used both punctuation mark... I.. don't know what to say.

(Example: ' - XYZ -' or - ' XYZ ' - or ' - ' XYZ ' - ' )

Maybe I'm just plain outdated.
Is that the latest trend? I mean putting pointless punctuation marks on your nick.

Gosh, I'm ranting like an old fart again.

=p

You do what you want with your nick and I blog what I felt like saying.
Fair?