Funetics! (It's like Phonetics, but Fun. Wait, no it isn't).

Everyone has a dialect. The South, Boston, San Fernando Valley. All these are famous for their dialects. But my personal dialect is not so regionally based. As near as I can discern, I speak "Overly correct English", with hints of "Passively Aggressively Grammatical." For instance, in most dialects of English, the following is an acceptable interchange:

Random Person: How you doin'?
Dialectical Speaker: Fine.

But in my dialect, it would occur more like this:
RP: How you doin'?
DS: I *am* doin*g* fine.

Aside from its verbal awkwardness ("I am" is a bad iamb), this was also revealed in the June 1998 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine to be the response most likely to get the shit kicked out of you in 87% of circumstances. Luckily, I attend a university that's a preserve of people willing to be such asses, and I can explore these consequences.

Take the email I received today. It raised the issue of how to spell a certain burger chain's name. And I realized the following progression:

In N Out. This is how any knave off the street might spell it upon first hearing. In fact, given today's knaves, we'd be lucky if it didn't end up 1N |\| 000u7! (1 M SO 31337).

In And Out. The way my other overeducated friend spelled it. This is the way the words are spelled.

In-N-Out. This is the official brand name, registered trademark, In-N-Out burgers. See what they did, there? Being hip by having a touch of the proletarian in them. They're hip, with it. A reminder of years past when such corporate desecration of the English Language was newfangled.

In And Out. How I will henceforth spell their name. Let's face it, I'm not cool. Yes, I am familiar with their preferred spelling. But just as there are people who would calque my adored "Philological Semantics" to "Phizzle Sizzle", I find that I must, to maintain my "credibility" (from the hip-hop term "cred"), rewrite it as In And Out. The only alternative is to remember that awful time in Mr. Vivona's 7th Grade Art Class when I referred to "gangsta" rap. Emphasizing the "sta". In my mind, the current generation of police-fuckers and kitten-killers didn't deserve the "er" that men like Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly had earned.

In everyone else's mind, I was a dorky, white middle-schooler taking his cues on urban culture from a well-skimmed Newsweek article.