Abandoning the English Language

Garrett · **Posted:** Thu Sep 11, 2008 2:03 am

epion04 wrote:

avwolf wrote:

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 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.

Dude, I RELY on the thing. I often misspell things like apparently and explanation. I can't seem to get their true spellings through my head. This is another scary thought. How acceptable will spelling errors be in the future?

And, uh, when you're known for proper grammar, I find it's often the retards that catch you when you slip. I once misspelled "adjacent" on a forum (for the record, it was a typo, not a real misspelling) and someone replied with "lol, ur an idiot. How u not spel "adjacent" rite?! stupid nub" (they banned me for my response to him, but that's a story for another day :grin: )

Wynni · **Posted:** Thu Sep 11, 2008 2:24 am

If you ever worry about the future of the English language, just pick up an untranslated copy of Chaucer. :wink: It should perk you right up.

We've always had our share of people butchering the language, and we always will. That's why we have "The King's (or Queen's) English, Cockney, American (and the various dialects thereof), et cetera et al.

We can now add internet-illiteri to the list.

Since I don't use Firefox and spellcheck myself the hard way, what does that make me? :shock:

epion04 · **Posted:** Thu Sep 11, 2008 2:41 am

Wynni wrote:

If you ever worry about the future of the English language, just pick up an untranslated copy of Chaucer. :wink: It should perk you right up.

We've always had our share of people butchering the language, and we always will. That's why we have "The King's (or Queen's) English, Cockney, American (and the various dialects thereof), et cetera et al.

We can now add internet-illiteri to the list.

Since I don't use Firefox and spellcheck myself the hard way, what does that make me? :shock:

Diligent is the first thing that comes to mind.

I have always been rather poor at spelling; while my vocabulary may be decent, the proper spellings often illude me. Without a spell checking tool I often don't even notice that I misspelled something. A random example of something I commonly mess up would be the word notice; I frequently type out "knotice" without even thinking, even though I know it is not correct. Thankfully the more often I have to correct a word with the spell checking tool, to better I remember it and tend to learn it that way. (That last sentence is another example of a commonly misspelled word, "remember" I often tried to type it out as "rember" for some reason. As I posted more, I found that I began to remember its proper spelling.)

*edit* One thing to remember is spellcheckers are not perfect, for example the word "illude" shows up as misspelled on the firefox spelling tool, and offers the correction "allude" when the illude is a correctly spelled. Allude has a different meaning entirely.

Dictionary.com-illude

Dictionary.com-allude

This also brings to mind the frequent misuse of "affect" and "effect."

Tuna · **Posted:** Thu Sep 11, 2008 3:39 am

Wow..."illude"...don't see that word used much...no, not at all...it seems to have been almost completely replaced by "elude" in common usage.
:3

Ryu · **Joined:** Wed Sep 03, 2008 8:50 am **Posts:** 120

FastChapter wrote:

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?

J00 ar3 K1DD1n9 m3? |D

Yavarin · **Posted:** Thu Sep 11, 2008 5:33 am

I doubt that joke will work in this thread Ryu.

On Topic: For me, it's a slow process. You see a word with weird spelling and think it's funny. And because everyone likes funny stuff, you start using it yourself. But after a while, it's not for the fun, you just got used to using the word.
Granted, there ARE people who simply are unable/unwilling to write understandable text.

Ryu · **Joined:** Wed Sep 03, 2008 8:50 am **Posts:** 120

Yavarin wrote:

I doubt that joke will work in this thread Ryu.

On Topic: For me, it's a slow process. You see a word with weird spelling and think it's funny. And because everyone likes funny stuff, you start using it yourself. But after a while, it's not for the fun, you just got used to using the word.
Granted, there ARE people who simply are unable/unwilling to write understandable text.

Depends on weather or not they see it as a joke. BUT AT LEAST IT FITS! leet annoys me because its like another language made up of retardacy.its just like that KAWAII crap

Kutch · **Joined:** Mon Sep 01, 2008 11:19 am **Posts:** 23

Ryu wrote:

ar3 J00 K1DD1n9 m3? |D

Fixed.

I think "giving up on" grammar is a quite serious issue. There isn't much room for grammatical error before the meaning actually changes. I feel uneasy about the rules for quotation marks, though. It's intuitive that everything between them is part of the quote. It also serves a better grammatical function:

"Hey," John said, "I know that dog."

"Two million babies die each year," he said.

See the difference? In the first one, the comma is actually part of what he said. "Hey, I know that dog." In the second one, it isn't. "Two million babies die each year." It would make more logical sense with:

"Two million babies die each year", he said.

Also, this doesn't look right to me:

The sign says, "You rock."

Why? Because the period that ends the sentence is between the quotation marks.

Weather this is important or knot, I dunno.

Kinuki · **Posted:** Thu Sep 11, 2008 8:59 am

I know there are exceptions to the rule of placing the punctuation inside the quotation marks, but I don't remember them as well as I'd like to. I seem to recall that if you're asking a question with a quote, then you ignore the punctuation inside the quote and place the question mark outside, so as to make it clear that you, and not the person you are quoting, is asking the question, i.e.: So, do you agree that "pies are amazing"? But it's been a while since I've had to learn the nitty-gritty of grammar so I'm a bit rusty on that.

As a humorous aside, I was dubbed the Semicolon King by an English teacher I had years ago. She'd never seen anyone use half as many semicolons as I did, and more amusing to her was that they were almost always grammatically sound, even if they could have been replaced by other punctuation.

Ryu · **Joined:** Wed Sep 03, 2008 8:50 am **Posts:** 120

Kutch wrote:

Ryu wrote:

ar3 J00 K1DD1n9 m3? |D

Fixed.

There was no need to. i had it like that on purpose.

Kinuki wrote:

I know there are exceptions to the rule of placing the punctuation inside the quotation marks, but I don't remember them as well as I'd like to. I seem to recall that if you're asking a question with a quote, then you ignore the punctuation inside the quote and place the question mark outside, so as to make it clear that you, and not the person you are quoting, is asking the question, i.e.: So, do you agree that "pies are amazing"? But it's been a while since I've had to learn the nitty-gritty of grammar so I'm a bit rusty on that.

As a humorous aside, I was dubbed the Semicolon King by an English teacher I had years ago. She'd never seen anyone use half as many semicolons as I did, and more amusing to her was that they were almost always grammatically sound, even if they could have been replaced by other punctuation.

(weird people alway tell me that i use parenthesis too much no joke)

TheRedWriter · **Posted:** Thu Sep 11, 2008 10:30 am

Yes, there is a literacy crisis. From articles that I have read it started as far back as the 1870's. Language is constantly changing, due to technology and/or less strict english teachers. I'm an English literature student and going into English education so it is very important that I teach myself the rules of grammar and mechanics. I am ashamed to say that I have never had a grammar class in my life because where I wen to school they did not teach anyone how to diagram sentences so I constantly find myself comma splicing everything that I write because it seems right to me. As you can imagine it was a rude awakening when I went to college and something I've had to work on relentlessly since I got here. But I think the crisis comes with the lack of enthusiasm. Students and some adults figure, I know how to speak English and that is good enough for me. In short I think we are an embarrassment to the language.

avwolf · **Posted:** Thu Sep 11, 2008 10:50 am

Kutch wrote:

"Hey," John said, "I know that dog."

"Two million babies die each year," he said.

See the difference? In the first one, the comma is actually part of what he said. "Hey, I know that dog." In the second one, it isn't. "Two million babies die each year." It would make more logical sense with:

"Two million babies die each year", he said.

No, in the second case, the comma replaces the period which would normally end his quote, because you haven't actually finished the sentence involving the quote. With the comma on the outside of the quotation mark, his words sort of trail off; it's not clear that there should be a stop there. Rotate the sentence the other way and you see what I mean:
He said, "Two million babies die each year."
The full stop at the end of the sentence is still necessary when you're quoting him, but it's replaced by a comma-termination when you're continuing the sentence after the quote.

Besides, while technically the comma in the first case does belong at that point in the quotation, it's added more for the purpose of grammatically correct quoting than it is because it belongs in the sentence. ;)

Kinuki wrote:

I know there are exceptions to the rule of placing the punctuation inside the quotation marks, but I don't remember them as well as I'd like to. I seem to recall that if you're asking a question with a quote, then you ignore the punctuation inside the quote and place the question mark outside, so as to make it clear that you, and not the person you are quoting, is asking the question, i.e.: So, do you agree that "pies are amazing"? But it's been a while since I've had to learn the nitty-gritty of grammar so I'm a bit rusty on that.

That seems right to me. Something like: Kinuki asked us, "Did you know pies are amazing?" I didn't have an answer for him then, but I think I do now. What about you? Did you know? Do you think "pies are amazing"?

Narane · **Posted:** Thu Sep 11, 2008 11:21 am

Ravage the English language!
http://babbys.ytmnd.com/

ruscfox · **Posted:** Thu Sep 11, 2008 12:12 pm

I will admit, I am not great with the English language with writing. It is a combination of forgetting rules and typing too fast (I correct mistakes if I can, otherwise Thank You Firefox!). But unfortunately, I don't speak english very well verbally. I use slang all the time and have a really tough time breaking out of it (I say Man alot..."Thanks a lot, man" to most people)

Ryusen · **Posted:** Thu Sep 11, 2008 12:13 pm

ruscfox wrote:

I use slang all the time and have a really tough time breaking out of it (I say Man alot..."Thanks a lot, man" to most people)

English is my native tongue, and even I say that. It's not a bad thing.

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