I know that when I put a number 1 after the title of this post, I am dividing my readers into two (possibly three) groups.
- Those who are thinking...oh good. I enjoyed that post so much...and there's more to come later! Yay!
- Those who are thinking...oh joy (sarcastically). I'm going to eventually have to read another, and possibly more than that, of these stupid grammar posts. I'll probably never see the end of it!
- And finally those who are thinking...fine, I've got better things to do than to read this dumb blog anyway. I'll just leave and never come back!
I hope most of you (the two or three that you are) will opt for view number 1. This post is for you. Unfortunately, it is not a very complementing post for some of you who live and breathe by online and/or electronic everything. It is about bad grammar and how it has snuck into our everyday lives almost undetected. For example, did you notice that there are already two grammar mistakes so far in this post? I'm thinking you probably spotted the first one without thinking. The title of this post is spelled wrong. It's "grammar," not "grammer." Do you even know what the second one is? It is in the third sentence of this paragraph. The word complementing should be spelled with an "i," not an "e." These were just to show you non-believers that yes, you probably do need to read this blog entry...unless you just don't care...those of you who think that way...well, you just suck, pardon my resentment.
I've noticed more and more that good grammar (there is a distinction between good and "proper" grammar, the former being the focus here) has gone into the proverbial ditch since things like email and Twitter® have become popular. I am not talking about internet lingo, text abbreviations, shorthand, and the like. I am talking about those mistakes that are obviously meant to be correct. These are the ones that irk me the most. For one thing, it distracts me from concentrating on what the message is trying to say. I get thinking about why someone wrote the word "muvee" instead of, well, if you don't know that one, just stop reading right now...you are hopeless.
I eventually realize that for the last paragraph or two, I have been thinking about the implications of the person who decided that "muvee" was easier or somehow shorter to write than the word "movie." Same number of letters...harder to even figure out.
In a clam shell, just check your spelling if nothing else. And don't use Spell Check™...as I have said before...it won't always be your friend. Now on to more interesting matters of grammar...legitimate shorthand for the internet. I say more legitimate because I don't find these things to be mistakes, but if society gets too used to them (which by now it already has), then we will lose all concepts of good English and grammar as we knew it when it might just be important (exempli gratia, resumés and official papers).
To make it very clear before I even begin, an Internet Acronym is not an acronym at all unless you can actually say it as a word by itself. For example, SCUBA, as most of us know, stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. However, the word Scuba is in the dictionary as a word. By the same token, ACORN is in the dictionary as "the typically ovoid fruit or nut of an oak, enclosed at the base by a cupule." Nonetheless, when used in a text message, it could be read as "A Completely Obsessive Really Nutty Person." Don't ask why I know that. On the other hand, IWBAPTAKYAIYSTA is not in the dictionary...yet. However, as I'm sure any internet text messaging savant will tell you, it stands for the most commonly used phrase "I Will Buy A Plane Ticket And Kick Your Ass If You Say That Again." Okay, that was an easy one.
Sometimes I will admit that people have gotten very creative with these abbreviations. For instance, do you know to what *$ refers? How about 511? The first one I have found to be kind of neat and very accurate. It means Starbucks. (Get it? Star a.k.a. asterisk + money a.k.a. bucks = Starbucks.) The other one is rather creative as well. 411 as we all know, refers to information. So, naturally, 511 would refer to something more than that. Hence, 511 means "too much information." Incidentally, that will be the topic of a later post, so mark your calendars for that one! And there is also one that I would love to be able to use more often...::poof::...meaning "I'm gone."
As fun as little smiley faces were when first conceived, they have become just an annoyance in some instances. Foremost is the amount of effort it sometimes takes to interpret the meaning of the "newer" emoticons. (You can't very well categorize them all as "smileys" anymore, since a majority of them don't smile at all.) For instance, it's probably pretty simple for the amateur text-er to figure out that :) or even :=) as I like to use, means some iteration of happy. But what about )8-) ? Believe it or not, it is a simple way of saying "scuba diver with hair." Or if you prefer, "Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus Diver with Hair." My question there is "why would you ever want to say that?"
And also in the category of "why" comes this very creative, yet useless emoticon → :-F . Any guesses? It refers to a Bucktoothed Vampire with one tooth missing! I think I missed that Twilight character. I must've been yawning → I-O.
I hope I have enlightened you and made you at least aware of some of the ridiculous things you do when communicating with other life forms. I will be back with more of these things that make you feel uncomfortable once you have been alerted to them in a later post. But for now, I'm outta here...
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