On the endangered species list of literature no creature is more threatened than the grammarian, seen here in her natural habitat, The New York Times. Note the twitching head, the nervous wringing of the reticulated paws, the scared-stiff exclamation point of tail. We’ve been known to use the occasional grammarian for target practice around here. Poor ex-Ninja Pete still has some shuriken scars in his back end from his days bearing my hasty posts. Luckily, I never done killt him.

My problem with message-board language brings up a prior problem in journalism: the difficulty of translating spoken language into written language. The philosopher Jacques Derrida gained notoriety by dimming the bright line between what was known in strange pre-Internet lingo (French, was it?) as langue and parole. He thought the written-spoken distinction was suspect and by turns collapsed and reasserted itself in the merry game of signification.

Nothing works more Frenchly and merrily this way — shape-shifting at a rapid pace — than Internet language, which morphs from standard English (a dialect of which has become the Web’s lingua franca) to other languages and dialects to slang and emoticons and acronyms and phonetic miscellany. (Take “hey guys, i’m stoopid. DOH! meh. GAH. :O wth.” Can this communication be taken as an admission of some kind of error? Can it be faithfully paraphrased as “she admitted her mistake on a message board”?) I can’t tell how much of this keycap casserole belongs in ink on paper or how much of it makes sense there.

The Sanhedrins of style at newspapers are not so amused by the merry game of signification. (Derrida’s not big with real newspapermen.) Most of them seem to believe in standardizing spoken English — to a point. At The New York Times, using nonstandard spelling to reflect dialect — “he wuz a good friend” — is seen as a sketchy business, since no two writers do it the same way and since it can reflect bias. But rhetorical eccentricities ought to be preserved. “I’m friends with him 20 years,” for example, does not have to become, “I have been friends with him for 20 years.”

Some architects of Times style have proposed that communication on a message board should be treated like the text of a novel. As novels of sorts, message boards ought to be excerpted using the same protocols that newspaper critics use to quote from fiction. That is, we should go light on the academic sics, addition brackets and omission ellipses, which in a paper can come across as sneering, cluttered, pretentious or all three.