Cyrillic letters as "funny" stand-ins for other letters

Writing Cyrillic letters as "funny" stand-ins for similar-looking letters in the Roman alphabet is annoying to some people whose languages use that alphabet. And it has no wittiness to make up for that.

I too look down on mockery of the Cyrillic alphabet, or of umlauts. Not as strongly as Viv Groskop does, but enough to give me a low opinion of whoever did it. Likewise for mockery of Chinese characters and Indian alphabets. The first time someone did these things, it may have been clever, but nowadays it is merely silly and trite.

I was just a little more clever when I pronounced Toys-Я-Us as if the Я were Cyrillic — as Toys-Ya-Us. I wasn't the one who chose to write it that way, rather I mocked the company by pronouncing its name in the correct way which it probably did not expect.

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