Spelling adn gramer is 4 loosers!!!!!!!!!!

Posted by Dave

Hello World.

Over on the blog for the previously-mentioned language geek site Wordie, user “uselessness” has posted an article about the ever-increasing destruction of the English language. He refers specifically to the online writing site Ficlets, which I have never used, but his arguments are equally applicable to many web-forums, blog comments, and the mobile phone of any teenager.

Of concern to the author is that there appears to be a trend amongst (presumably) young writers to celebrate and promote bad English:

In the good old days (ha ha) the serious writers would rank garbage as garbage: one star out of five. The hope was that people would get the message and step it up. Unfortunately they didn’t, and they now outnumber the rest of us. To add insult to injury, the kids consistently rank the worst stories with the full five stars so the entire ranking system is useless. Most of the good writers have apparently fled in terror by now.

There’s an underlying attitude here, I think. It’s apathy toward all things grammar, or more. Sometimes I detect outright contempt for it. It’s never capitalizing anything. It’s never breaking text into paragraphs. It goes beyond not knowing how to spell; it’s not caring how to spell. It’s waiving the single- or (already extreme) double-exclamation points in favor of eight or ten or fifteen of them.

I’m concerned that SMS and “IM-speak” is bastardizing communication amongst the youngest generation.

I thought this was appropriate after some of the recent discussion on this very site (after which I am sufficiently versed in both the singular and plural forms of Latin nouns, thank you very much).

As a writer, both recreationally and potentially professionally (try saying that ten times fast), spelling and grammar are always of great interest to me. I am an awful speller, but I make an effort to get it right as much as possible (or at least hit the spell-check button). I am of the belief that I shouldn’t need to be a cryptologist to read an SMS message, and neither should anyone else. It would seem this belief is decreasingly shared by others of my generation.

– [via Errata]

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