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.

By contrast, when transcribing message-board posts, idiosyncrasies of language should be preserved as far as possible and taken as intentional, unless in context they are obviously evidence that the writer has innocently hit the wrong key (“teh,” “rihgt”). A “wuz” on the Internet remains “wuz” in the paper. In thorny cases, a critic or reporter can extenuate a passage outside of quotation marks. (“ ‘The soiled fish,’ writes Melville, conjuring an odd image with a ‘soiled’ where perhaps ‘coiled’ was intended.”)

Daniel Okrent, the first public editor for The Times, who is now at work on a book about the history of Prohibition, e-mailed me further thoughts: “The minute you start trying to replicate someone’s accent or diction, you run the risk of appearing to be patronizing or worse. When the Mississippi State football coach said something like, ‘There ain’t but one color that matters here,’ the paper was wrong to recast it as ‘There is only one color . . .’  he didn’t say that.”

Okrent continued: “But if in reaching for the sound of his voice they had rendered it as ‘I ain’t gonna suspend mah players fer actin’ up on weekends,’ it would have been inappropriate. I say stick with the actual words the man uses and not with the way he says them.”

Dropping g’s, Mark Twain-style, does look supremely corny, though The Times once liberally clipped those g’s into apostrophes for folksy effect. In 1907, the paper published an article called “Mr. Devery Has Some Thoughts on the Way Things Is Goin’.” Devery, a former New York police chief, was what can only be called a colorful character, complete with colorful, g-free words and colorfully disagreeing subjects and verbs. “If things is run right,” Devery opined, in The Times’s rendition, “the chief of police ought to be nothin’ but a sort of foreman, a feller to carry out the orders of them above him. He ought to be a sort of  of  editor.”

Comes off kind of fakey today, don’t it? Certainly having one or two subjects in a news article say “goin’ ” or “gonna” or (come on) “gwine” when everyone else gets their participles standardized is unfair and misleading. On the other hand, Times readers of 100 years ago found Devery’s dialect funny, and writers and readers alike crave funny quotations. It may seem condescending or even racist to use the dialect conventions of “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” but it also seems like a crime against humor and the truth of Web language to adjust “How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?” in the name of imagined fairness.