I look at my phone screen and cringe when I read “idk rn but ill txt u ltr.” First of all, punctuation has been part of the English language since around 400 A.D., according to The English Project, not to mention that reading in all lowercase letters with half the words spelled wrong is simply confusing. While the internet provides us with many valuable learning and communication tools, it’s butchering our language.

We’re making things fast and easy. I get it. People have shorter attention spans than a decade ago, according to Medical Daily, and we want to get messages across in the simplest way, even if that means getting rid of vowels, capital letters and punctuation. We’ve spent years working to expand our vocabularies and structure our language. It’s a shame to throw it all away because we’re tired of taking the time to use capital letters or full words to ask our mom what she’s making for dinner.

People argue that as long as texts and tweets are understandable to the people reading them, it doesn’t matter what sort of language they use. That has some validity, but at the same time, our language has rules so everyone can understand what other people say or write. And if you don’t use any punctuation, chances are your texts and tweets are going to be confusing. According to Dr. Amy Barker, English teacher, internet language is a double-edged sword and tends to exclude groups of people because not everyone knows what things mean. Texting lingo is exceedingly complicated and always changing, leaving both older and out-of-touch generations along with younger generations in the dust as it progresses.

Slang terms, regardless of how often they invade our language, can sometimes go too far. We’ve gone from “thou” to “you” and “art” to “are” but it’s a bit much to go from “you” to “u” and from “are” to “r.” And for some reason, people keep changing the meanings of words that have been the same for years, and for what? So we can pretend we have power over a language that has been in the works for centuries? If I wanted to, I could make up my own slang terms right now and use them all over the place like people use “lit,” “swag,” “on fleek,” or whatever else kids say these days. Not that I have any desire to alter our language, of course.

Texting acronyms are just as bad and seemingly infinite as the slang on the internet. Sure, it’s nice if you know what they all mean, but even as a 16-year-old, I find myself turning to Urban Dictionary to figure out what “IMHO” stands for (in my humble opinion, in case you were wondering). If someone was trying to save time by only using the first letters of the words they want to tell me, they would fail because it would end up taking more time for me to decipher what they were trying to say.

The internet has allowed us to pick and choose which parts of our language we want to use, slicing apart our vocabularies and implanting new definitions of words and slang to confuse us all. While I am a firm believer in correctly punctuated text messages, it seems that much of the internet couldn’t care less about colons and commas. I’m not trying to rid the internet of any and all LOLs and ILYSMs, but can’t we muster up enough respect to use a capital letter or an apostrophe every once in awhile?

English officially died the day the first text message was sent Dec. 3, 1992. Yes, it’s tragically hard to fathom, but the awful twisting of proper language sparked by the invention of the internet and texting is sending grammar and spelling protocol into the clouds. Only the most senile of people would call something “on fleek” and omitting commas or periods in texts is akin to defecating on the wonderful language we hold dear.

Now, I’m sure you had no trouble reading through that lede, but you should have. See, if you were using traditional, correct English, it makes no sense. Because to “fathom” something was to wrap your arms around it, and if something was “awful” it was absolutely fantastic. The “clouds” were actually rocks and if something was “senile” it was simply mature. And to “defecate” was to purify, not to poop. But we had the audacity to come in and ravage the English language and completely change the meanings of those words. Now nobody even bats an eye.

We shouldn’t skip a beat when Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre wrote about how, “ejaculations, terrified murmurs sounded in every room,” because, after all, to ejaculate really just means to exclaim suddenly. But no, that’s not how language works. Language is as alive as we are. It, much like any other living thing, is subject to Darwinism: it evolves or it dies. That’s precisely why you don’t hear many people outside of a law school classroom speaking Latin anymore.

But, just as English evolves, people take issue with it every step of the way. People today are just as angry about “lowkey” as people in the ‘60s were about calling fun things “a blast.” The kids used it at first, the adults were angry because they didn’t understand it, then they themselves started to adopt the new phrase and now it’s ingrained into our language to the point where it doesn’t sound like slang at all.

Slang always has and always will infiltrate the sanctity of people’s beloved English, and a few stubborn purists will wave their canes in the air about it for a bit too long. But the reality is, most of what we are saying today would sound really strange to someone 200 years ago, because language is fluid.

Sure, the internet may have made slang more transient and quicker to spread, but it also made deciphering it infinitely easier. Figuring out what “ILYSM” means is not as complicated as solving a Rubik’s Cube as some people might have you believe. Please, if you’re sitting wracking your brain over new-fangled acronyms, stop before you pull a neuron. Decoding this new language is as difficult as a quick search on Google—or even better, Urban Dictionary, which was built specifically for this kind of thing. Literally (not in the figurative sense), just whip out your phone and type the word in. Never once have I found myself truly befuddled by a sentence I’ve received in a text, and that’s coming from someone who’s generally late to the game with slang.

This so-called plague upon English is remedied by a willingness to learn and the ability to use a search engine. And I don’t say this to bully anyone, but rather to help them. Unless, of course, it was the early 1900s, where “bullying” actually meant doing something wonderful, in which case, consider yourself bullied. So instead of throwing your arms up at a new word or a missed comma, try using context clues, looking it up or simply asking someone. There you go, your “problem” is solved.