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.