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Continuing off of the conversation sprouting in the EPIC FAIL thread and in somewhat of a response to the presence of a now notorious troll, I thought it would be interesting to discuss how teenagers and even some grown adults are becoming more and more content in giving up on proper written English.

A lot of us, including myself, crack jokes on the constant overuse of leet speak. We've had members come and go who utterly refuse to "follow the crowd" as it were and write out grammatically correct sentences. Such as the guy who capitalized the first letter in every word in every sentence he typed, or the ones who simply don't see the use in punctuation or capitalization.

I know, I'm probably sounding a wee bit elitist. Granted, this is the Internet. There are no professors here to dock our final grades for writing in chicken scratch, and certainly no rules to follow so long as the message gets across. Even so, it seems like the more people accept misspellings, broken grammar, and absent punctuation on the Internet, the more they're willing to accept it in the real world.

I've critiqued essays and shorts pieces of fiction for friends of mine and it just stuns me how much flies under their radar. Even in 300 to 400-level college English courses, some students don't know how to place quotations around a citation. "It sometimes ends up looking like this", and they're perfectly fine with it until they're begrudgingly told to change it.

I don't know, does anybody else see this as a problem or am I just talking in circles?

I read that there's over twenty different recorded - so likely more unrecorded - fully integrated types of slang in the English language. Most of them are based off race, some are based off location, some come from a profession ("Hooah battle, that poag highspeed is an ate-up bean counter." - feel free to translate). Every dialect has slang, but because America is known as the mixing pot of the world and has tons of different kinds of people using the language, naturally there will be plenty flavorful variations.

Oh I've got nothing against colloquialisms. That's all part of the fun of visiting isolated communities, even though they're harder to find with the technology we have these days. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of these hoity-toity people who sit at their computers all day waiting to find some slip of grammar on Wikipedia.

What my biggest complaint surrounds students in varying levels of education who blatantly refuse to learn English. And not so much the formal language as the basic rules. You capitalize the first letter in every sentence, and proper nouns. You put quotation marks around quotes and the punctuation stays within those marks. And the biggest gripe I have is when people just don't know how to spell. MSWord's Spell-Checker only goes so far. When you're in a situation where you need to physically write something out for a person, be they prospective employer or a coworker, you're going to look like a complete moron when you spell "their" as "there," and "your" as "you're."

As an ol' English major myself (a bit rusty, though), I can totally sympathize. I also agree that the variety of "regional slang" does indeed make things more interesting, but the little fella living in a midwestern suburb has little excuse when it comes to grammar and spelling issues...some are plain lazy, as Fast has pointed out.

I guess the big question is: How is this happening, and what can be done about it?
o.o

I tried, but I couldn't find any grammatical mistakes in the rant.



But, with today's society so invested in the anonymous internet, do you think it's become almost...expected (?) to use improper grammar and punctuation? Maybe not that exact wording, perhaps it's more of the norm to type like you're using AOL whenever writing meets the internet.

And that behavior may carry over into other, non-internet-related areas, such as writing essays and papers. If you're constantly changing between IM'ing and essays, I suppose it could get confusing if you never passed basic English. Maybe it's not a conscious ignoring of real English, but they've just gotten used to the IM scene that it's hard to not type like that.

There's simply no excuse for writing in leetspeak in forums, because you've got plenty of time to write (thus no need for abbreviations) and you're really not speaking anything, so dialects would just come out as words that are understandable. It just becomes a problem when those words are misspelled.

But what can we do; expect everyone to be smarter? Try harder? Some people simply can't spell. :| I remember my old science teacher who couldn't properly use its/it's and your/you're. I understand it if someone makes mistakes like that from hand writing; it might be that the person can't spell or it's just a typo. But in the internet, I've got thousands of ways to correct myself in no time; Firefox's auto-spell-check is really handy at pointing out my typos.

I've gotten a few raised eyebrows when playing World of Warcraft for typing out full sentences in mid-raid. I'm a fast typist, so it's not hard for me to jump in and out of a chat menu. But even so, one person out of a hundred will openly laugh at you for bothering with them thar fancy periods and shift keys.

What bugs me the most is when people become so out of practice, it seeps into their speaking skills. I've heard people say "lol" as a word without flinching, and it just makes you want to break their teeth in. Or people who can't speak without inserting random "likes" or "ands."

Alright I see what you guys mean. Honestly I think I'd be a bit of a hypocrite here for speaking against this, because I very much enjoy doing anything and everything as quickly as possible, including writing and speaking. Of course, I'm literate in a place like this out of respect for others, but man when I don't have to worry about people understanding me I'm an entirely different person.

Of course, that might be the cure for this issue. If everybody respected everybody enough to speak and write legibly when it mattered, this problem probably wouldn't exist.

Personally, I'm a pretty fast typist, and I actually can't get myself to type in anything but complete sentences. But, I'll admit, I use the auto spell check in Firefox way too much. I'm simply a bad speller, but I try. And using IM speak is near impossible for me to do without concentrating. *sigh*

I actually saw someone using ne for any. I could understand texting lingo in well... texting, seeing as many cell phones are limited in the number of characters, but on a forum, ne =/= any.

I wouldn't fault anyone on not knowing all the little comma rules, or occasionally dangling a modifier out there, but I expect capitalization and punctuation. HECK! Leaving out the coma's is okay, so long as you have a period in there.

And, just a little aside, never give my grandma anything to proof read. You'll get a paper with more red ink than black back. :P

Well I think part of the problem is that some of the people teaching kids don't know it themselves. My example would be me... in my education I didn't even have a teacher TRY to teach me anything about English and its many conventions. (as everyone examines what I'm saying with a fine tooth comb for grammatical/punctuation errors :oops:). I mean part of it comes from the lack of education, and the other from the medium. People assume it's the internet and as we all know internet = half-[censored]-ism. (After all you don't know anyone personally so they can't be ridiculed for it except over the internet... and we all know how that goes.)

As for internet terms seeping into our modern lexicon, I'd argue that that is the product of a living language. A word doesn't retain its meaning forever, and we add new words all the time. Since huge portions of our society now spend time here it's only a matter of time before they meld into our actual language. examples would be like owned ---> pwned ---> woot ---> "wtf" ---> "lol"

Though not being an English major myself I find it more troublesome than anything. :P

I'm irritated by this stuff for a lot of reasons. Most of all is probably just my own, somewhat elitist nature. But the importance of "speaking" clearly on forums can't be emphasized enough. The only gauge we anonymous Internet people have for a person is their ability to use the language. We judge a lot about a person based on their ability to spell, and more importantly, use proper punctuation. Take Keldoth for an example -- I placed his age significantly higher than it is because he's careful to be a literate human being on the forum.

The use of leet is particularly offensive to me because I'm a computer programmer. I know its roots, and if there's anyone who can claim descendence from the group of people who orginated it, it'd be me. But when I see it, it feels like reading racial slurs -- the people who use it now use it to be "cool" with the nerd crowd. It's the texual equivalent of wearing ThinkGeek shirts and believing that gives you my respect. And anybody with actual programming ability gave it up long ago, because it's a waste of keystrokes. It's nerd poseur at it's most pure, and that, quite frankly, is embarrassing. It doesn't help that the people who abuse it also tend to be immature and often apparently unintelligent, or at least lacking in common sense and reasoning skills.

Again, as a programmer and engineer, my whole life revolves around syntax and semantics. It's why I'm so retentive about my own language use (apart from my understanding of the power of language and my personal enjoyment of using that power). If you mess up the semantics or the syntax of a programming language, you can't predict what your program will do, assuming it even works at all. The English language (or other written languages) aren't that different, humans just happen to be very good at parsing gobbletygook into approximate meanings. That's what lets people get away with being lazy or not bothering to ensure that they use their language correctly. But when you understand how much it dilutes your message to use language improperly, it's like twisting a little knife each time you see somebody who can't tell "there," "their," and "they're" apart.

*sigh* I don't think I can express in words how much I hate it when someone asks me for an explanation, and I make it as simple as I can for them, and when they don't understand why you can't get AIM without a connection to the internet (yes, this actually happened), they respond with "El oh el, was that english?" I almost hit, just for being retarded! (For those who don't understand how that relates to the topic, and I can't believe I'm explaining this, it's because he asked if I was speaking english when he was speaking in IM Abbreviation himself)

I shudder to think of the direction today's youth is headed in, and I don't even want to consider how bad it'll be for the next generation, when everyone's PARENTS will be talking this way. It just seems to get worse and worse, every day. And I REALLY dislike how much worse it got, at least at my school, after that damn cell phone commercial. "IDK, my BFF, Jill?" *hiss*

In a chatroom or game, where everything's rather fast paced or the subject is changing every five seconds (attention span is a rant for another day, though) I can understand shortening words somewhat, and typos and spelling errors can be acceptable as long as they're not constant, but in real life (NOT RL, AND IF YOU CORRECT ME, I'LL [censored] FIND YOU AND KILL YOU WITH A WAFFLE) and on forums/content comments(i.e.youtube)/Yahoo! Answers/Myspace/etc. where you have all the time in the world to think things out and revise and edit your post/comment, there is no excuse.

You mentioned in the fail thread the excuse many students seem to be using to not learn. The whole "I'm never going to use this again" argument just doesn't work when it comes to english, because unless they're planning on learning another language to be their primary spoken language, then they need to get off the chatroom and study or face the belt (this is why I'm probably going to make a terrible father).

Although, to be honest, I do often intentionally ignore some rules because they just don't make sense. For example, placing punctuation inside the quotes when a quote is ending a sentence never made sense to me at all, and I'd like to know who thought that one up. If that particular punctuation mark isn't meant to be the one the quote ends with, then it could change the meaning of the quote entirely. It also makes it rather difficult to separate sentences, but I guess I'm alone in my opinion here.

So, yeah, you all need to learn english. (THAT MEANS YOU, TRI-EDGE)

EDIT: On a more positive note, I've taken to commenting on Youtube video commentors rather than the videos themselves. It's loads fun, and I think you all should give it a shot. The way I figure, the more people we get in on this, people will see it as popular and start posting in english to be a part of it (stupidest idea ever, I know, but I figure it's worth a shot)

I will admit to dropping certain abbreviations here on the forums, generally the ones for the longer phrases. IIRC for "if I recall correctly" and AFAIK for "as far as I know" are two examples. I'm not proud of it, but I don't know know if I'll be able to change my ways.

I find myself doing that unconsciously as well. I usually catch myself, but it scares me sometimes. I think we're all slowly losing touch with the english language. It's a frightening thought.

I personally believe that as long as you at least know the rules, an occasional abbreviation here or there is not going to be a major deal.

As for myself, I almost abuse the Firefox spell check tool.