aristoteliancomplacency:

Internet linguistics thing:

This is what a keyboard mash looks like…

 in qwerty: ad;fjksadfj;adsjf;

in dvorak: aoeusnthaoesus

in colmak: aostenastoasnonn

qwerty keyboard mash is the keyboard mash that we all recognise. Like… it’s a thing. we recognise what it is, we recognise what it means, what it represents: it’s basically the home row (the middle row) of the qwerty keyboard. It doesn’t have to be in a specific (dis)order, but it does have to be specific characters. 

And if your keyboard mash doesn’t look like that, then… we don’t necessarily recognise it as a keyboard mash: not all random collections of letters are created equal. Sometimes when you mash your keyboard you… don’t create a keyboard mash. I use dvorak and increasingly I find that I either just… don’t use a keyboard mash where I would have before because… it doesn’t look like a keyboard mash when I do it..

or I quickly switch my keyboard back to qwerty JUST to do the mash, 

OR… I sit here trying to type a qwerty keyboard mash on a dvorak keyboard (which, for the record, looks like this: a;sjkjfjka;skjdf;sa  and took me about 30 seconds to write)

possibly of interest to @allthingslinguistic

or of interest to no one. <_<

(on a slightly related note, you can also kind of tell the difference between when a cat walks over a qwerty keyboard and when they walk over a dvorak keyboard. Because the q is right next to the cmd key on dvorak, my cats quit a lot of my programs when they walk over a dvorak keyboard, but even when they don’t manage to quit the program, you can tell the difference between Cat on a Qwerty Tin Roof and Cat on a Dvorak Tin Roof.)