lol ur 2 funni

It seems as if the English language is slowly decaying.

I know, I sound like an old man, remarking about "kids these days", reminiscing about how things used to be. Sadly, this is just how an average person who has an articulate mind and knows how to spell will be perceived. However, the only times I hear older people complaining about the way in which young people speak, is when they talk about "that rap music", because they have a problem with swearing (and obviously hip hop is the cause of swearing). This is not the case with me though; I have no problem with swearing, although of course there is a time and a place. My problem however does lie with younger people, because a lot of my problem has to do with the Internet generation.

I know, how ironic, posting a rant on a blog, about how the Internet is destroying language skills.

However, I blame the people, not the Internet. While the Internet surely gives people the means (blogs, forums, IM services) with which to defecate all over the English language, it is the people in the end who choose what to say, and more importantly, how to say it.

All of these "lol-isms" such as "wtf", "brb" and "g2g" may be helpful in some way; expressing a universal idea, and communicating on the simplest terms, in order to be transparent. Though this probably isn't the thought behind it all. Such abbreviations arose from IM and text messaging, in order to save time/keep messages short to save money. But how does typing "roflmao" instead of "haha" save any time?

Well it saves me time in figuring out that you are a fucking moron.

What's worse though, is the spelling. Using numbers and saying "u" and "r" might have been cool when you were 15 but come on, is it really that hard to type "you"? Even worse still, is intentionally incorrect spelling for words, when it has the same amount of letters... "KEWL" IS NOT FUCKING COOL.

Sure, I would have said "lol" and "gtfo" back in the day, but I was 13. Are you 13, sad and lonely Internet-dwelling man? Well, you probably say you are in the chat rooms, but that's besides the point.

Omitting punctuation is something I am guilty of, along with a lack of capital letters, but does that even come close to "lololololol dat iz a pissa bro, ur 2 funni"?

The problem doesn't just lie with the language of the Internet though, as more and more in real life conversations am I noticing the intellectual inferiority of people in their speech. Although, this is probably because of the bogan customer base of the place which I work at, and the inherent unintelligible dribble that those people are known for.

This even extends to our perception of people though. As you have just noticed, I have made a sweeping generalisation about an entire class of people, deeming them inferior. But I don't care. My focus is on the perception of people who exercise a larger vocabulary; people who's verbose speech patterns see them labeled as "pretentious" or "nerds". This is especially prominent in politics, with many politicians being heralded for "speaking to the common man" or being "plainly spoken". It's as if we value the dumbing down of our leaders, accounting for the lowest common denominator in every respect. When a politician, especially a world leader, speaks at the intellectual level which is expected of somebody in such a high position, who has presumably been educated very well, they are called "too smart" or "pretentious". Sure it's great for a leader to unify his people by being speaking at the lowest level, so as to account for stupid people not being able to understand words with three syllables, but how is it seen as fair to disparage someone like that - even mock them - for being intelligent? If we don't value intelligence in the position of a world leader, where else would we value it? If we are electing these people to run our countries, shouldn't we place more emphasis on "this guy is sharp, he knows what he is doing" as opposed to "I understand what he just said"? I just feel like you can be clear and concise without having to limit your vocabulary.



Who knows what will happen with language in the next 50 years? Maybe Internet memes will take over the world, reducing all conversations to abbreviation filled, slang infested "expressions". Or maybe we will learn from the horrible downturn in school results. I can't say.


tl;dr, right? yeah well fuck you because it took me ages to find out what that even meant.