Showboating in Forums

There was a thought provoking post in the Carma forums last week by weng, who mentioned that the English used was so flowery that if he read through the entire thread, his english would have improved substantially. Well, things are not so easy, my post reproduced here: (Non Singlish readers may want to email me at michaeltanyk@gmail.com for a translation :) )

http://forum.carma.com.sg/showpost.php?p=17539201&postcount=71

Sometimes, conflict forces one to stretch the capabilities of their english lah... sometimes stretch to distortion liao.... But the honest thing is this: Sometimes people use bombastic and chim words, and cliches and bromides and banal phrases, to sound impressive and to hide the low quality content of the message. They depend on this kind of language to stop the other party from responding.

For people whose native language is not english, they usually do not comment, and the people who use this kind of chim words try to sound impressive to the non-native english readers, and depend on these readers not to realise the content of the message at all, so even if one is losing the real argument, most readers will not think so.

This does not work in USA and UK forums though, so if one posts this way in those forums, they get SCREWED so bad they so pai seh. They can only do it in SG forums, at least for the next 10 years.

I may also be guilty of this. After a life of forumming, perhaps since 1988, this kind of thing become instinctive liao.