Today, we celebrate the life and mourn the loss of a dear old friend. He was born at the dawn of history. He saw the creation of the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence. He was there for the birth of Harry, Ron and Hermione and the death of the poets from “Dead Poet’s Society.” Unfortunately, he has now passed. Today, we mourn the tragic murder of the English language. The culprit is none other than the Internet.
The Internet has annihilated English, leaving mountains of evidence in its wake. Log onto Facebook, and the homepage is little more than uncapitalized “I’s,” run-on sentences with no end in sight and a total of four vowels, most of which lie in the constant stream of acronyms for every kind of laughter imaginable (LOL, LMAO, LMFAO, ROFL, ROFLMAO, ROFLMFAO, and my favorite, LQTM).
Granted, I have a bias as a writer. Topics regarding language agitate me more than those who could care less about sculpting words into a form so poetic the strongest man in the world would swoon (see? Told you I’m a writer). Yes, I use proper grammar, punctuation and spelling in everything I put online. I even capitalize my hashtags on Twitter. Anything posted on the Internet stays there forever, so I figure something that eternally endures should sound as smart as possible. Intelligence is determined by not merely the content of an argument but how it is delivered. Fourteen exclamation points and a finger glued to the Caps Lock key does not scream, “Listen to all my wise ideas.”
I’m not asking for complete and total reform, just a little respect toward the language that has given us so much. I can handle hashtags. I kind of like LOL. but if u tlk lik thiz, u g2g.