I Liek Ur Blog
As anyone who knows how to use the internet is aware (and I’m assuming that means a majority of my readers), there is an entire society that has burst into existence in cyberspace. And as anyone who has spent enough time on the internet knows, that society is a horrible, horrible place.
We’ve all heard stories about the level of human indecency that can be achieved when you give a person the ability to communicate with almost anyone in the world while still retaining nearly complete anonymity. There was a man with alleged mental illnesses posting hateful comments on “In Memory Of” videos on YouTube and causing grief to the victims’ loved ones. There was a group of grown men harassing a teenage girl over MySpace because she posted suicidal messages. We can’t forget that the internet is also home to the soulless person who also invented spam e-mails.
This blog is not about them.
Don’t get me wrong, I think all of those things are horrible, but they are isolated incidents. Just like watching a disturbing news story, it doesn’t represent a majority of the human population or even the population of just the United States. They are the bizarre exceptions to the rules we have placed on our society. The problem arises when those exceptions become the rules.
It’s no secret to anyone that knows me that I like video games quite a lot. Specifically, I enjoy playing video games over the internet with random strangers that I have never met and will most likely never speak to again. As anyone who plays video games over the internet or frequents an internet forum or reads YouTube comments will tell you, there is an epidemic of laziness spreading throughout the world.
It probably began at some point when someone realized they could type u instead of you. Then some1 else realized that u could shorten quite a few statements by just takin off a few letters. Or takin out punctuation so that u can save a few precious characters so that it fits in ur text message. All logical conclusions, but that’s when logic ended.
R3plac1n l3tt3rs w1th numb3rs mak3s n0 s3ns3, 1t d03sn’t sh0rt3n a stat3m3nt, 1t mak3s 1t hard3r t0 r3ad. Spelling words differently, such as speshul instead of special, does not shorten them or make it faster. That is literally the same amount of characters and actually took more effort to type because my brain forced me to spend three seconds resisting the spell check prompt.
And it is constantly getting worse. Every time I think I have begun to understand what the current typing convention is a new one is invented that is even more baffling than the last. It has gotten to the point where there is a huge divide between those people who value grammar and spelling and those who have apparently lost the cognitive ability to make sense.
Worse yet, it has leaked into the real world. I recently became friends with someone I met at one of those work parties that you don’t want to go to but do anyways on the off-chance you’ll have fun. We exchanged contact information, presumably so that we could hang out at a later date, and went on our merry ways. She sent me a text message a few days later and I have literally been unable to hold a conversation with her through text messages because she clearly was in some horrible accident the day after and has lost all control of her fingers.
So, that being said, I ask that you take one thing away from this blog: for my sake and the sake of others like me, show some pride in your words. Take that extra two seconds to type out “you”. Go ahead and add a comma, it won’t bite. Go forth and populate the interweb with well thought out YouTube comments and spell checked forum posts. And most of all, please learn to spell before you text me again. I can’t understand a single word of your last one.
Ranting with Ranty 
I used to feel this way, until internet culture kinda wore me down. I think using the capslock key, mispelling words and sometimes just even leaving a period off the end of a sentence adds comedic effect.
The other issue is, there are people who take it to different levels. I could say I hate those people who use “u” instead of you, and someone who is way more ardent than me will criticize me for using “kinda” instead of “kind of” that first sentence, and someone even crazier than that will criticize them for using weasel-words like kind of in the first place, no matter how they’re spelled.
I give a crap about grammar, but I chose not to use it all the time. The key is, I understand what the rules are, and I know which exactly which ones I’m breaking and how I’m breaking them. Furthermore, if I write something in bad grammar to be silly, I can also rewrite it properly if tasked to.
I honestly try to write coherently. Even if I’m taking liberty with the language, I know anyone can read and understand what I’m writing, which is the exact same approach I take when speaking. So, when I make a genuine typo and the internet won’t let me correct it, and someone comes into correct it in a snarky way, I go through the freaking roof.
Once that happened to me once too often, I started to become a little more open minded. We’re able to write more freely on the internet than we’ve ever been able to in history and more people write now than ever in our history. These people that have turned out language into a primordial soup are also the kind of people who would never even put pen to paper if the internet didn’t exist. They just kinda are what they are.
Perhaps the english language will become something other than one universal standard, and instead be broken up into different styles and written dialects.
First off, congratulations on being the first person to leave a comment on my blog! Secondly, thanks for making it well thought out and spell checked!
I suppose I’m just a bit of a grammar prude. I can accept typos (I’d be a massive hypocrite if I didn’t, as my fat fingers love to hit the wrong keys constantly) and minor mistakes. I can accept using shortening strategies on chats that have time constraints (Video games) or size constants (Twitter), but the thing that drives me insane is when someone writes something that has no time limit (Forum posts, YouTube comments, etc) who could take the extra 30 seconds to spellcheck and they make the conscious choice not to.
As for the styles and written dialects, our language is already split up quite a bit and that is all fine and dandy until I think about the fact that, historically speaking, the dialect that becomes the standard is most often the easiest to speak/write that is spoken/written by the greatest majority of english speakers. I fear the day when all conversations will be able to fit into a neat 140 characters and the language I speak/write is called “Old English”
A side note for you and all future commenters on my blog: I am all for free speech and sharing of ideas, however, I do reserve the right to edit and delete comments on my blog. I made an edit to your post and changed a word that could be considered offensive to some of my older/more proper readers (Replaced by the word “freaking”). If you ever have an issue with an edit I make, you can feel free to bring it up with me. I just want to make my blog accessible to as many people as I possibly can.
I love this post. Luv it!!!! 😉
Hey Rantypants–just wanted to let you know that there are a couple small typos in your anti-typo screed. Specifically, “well-thought-out” and “spell-checked” should both be hyphenated, because they are compound modifiers preceding the noun they modify (in this case, “comments”). 😛
Also, this issue is somewhat humorous, partially because before 1600, English (like most languages) had no standardization of anything. People spelled words however they liked, usually attempting to do so phonetically. It’s only with the introduction of dictionaries and grammar books that we have truly developed any kind of standardization. Furthermore, the first “modern” dictionary, meaning that it was definitive, alphabetical, and described the origin and use of words in addition to how they were spelled, didn’t appear until the mid-18th century.
In other words: Your highfalutin’ grammers ain’t much older’n them there leet-speakin’ texter fiends!