The Internet

I realize the irony in posting a rant about the Internet over the Internet. This is just the most public forum I can think of.

Now, onto my point.

From "leet" speak to text speak, it's almost disturbing to see the way in which technology, though mostly the Internet, is killing the English language. I'm seeing people ranging in age from their 50s to as young as their teens using more and more of these pseudo adaptations of the English language.

In my work, I am frequently being texted by my manager to come in, though, half of the time, the language is one which I can barely translate due to the missing letters, horrendous misspellings, and just flat out lack of grammatical correctness. I realize that I am far from perfect in my use of the language's little idiosyncrasies. Heck, my second sentence is a glaring faux pas in terms of structure and usage.

My main grievance with the language as it is shifting though is the way in which today's youth is growing in terms of language. An acquaintance of mine who teaches middle school has spoken countless times of how his students are incapable of writing in proper English. You has become U. See is now c. Even the advent of spell-check, which I am currently admitting to using during this post, has driven down the ability to know how to spell. Hand written essays are now chock full of mangled words scribed without the guidance of a programmed dictionary.

A family member of mine, who is on Facebook far more than I can actually consider human sadly, is one of the worst offenders I've seen to date. With every status post, I see her posting updates such as "we r gonna go shoppin this weekend ..... um we r gonna have family time weth each other" and "the chearfull charmander is gonna have a chearfull day at feild day tomorrow." Sadly, right now, my screen is almost glowing yellow from the way spell check is pointing out the errors.

There are worse offenders, but I'm not going to pull out those specific offenses. I had a difficult enough time typing those out word for word.

Sadly, this isn't what made me want to post all of this.

What did? As my last status message states, "So instead of thinking of original status messages, people can get apps on FB to come up with ones for them that are supposedly smart, funny, or intentionally dumb. I'll take my free thought with a side of disgust, please. Thanks."

I'm sure people out there have seen these applications I'm mentioning. If not, consider yourselves lucky. Over the years, plagiarism has increased through the use of the Internet and sources which people think will not be discovered. It seems now, though, that people are now plagiarising the thoughts of others without consideration of the thought except, "Oh, it's funny so people will laugh." What happened to the idea of coming up with insightful commentary which made people laugh through the simple use of wit alone?

What happened to the days of people who wanted to emulate George Carlin? Who came up with their own thoughts? I know I'm guilty of posting the odd quote and lyrics, but that is dispersed throughout bits of observations and self deprecation based commentary. It's not an almost hourly occurrence that takes place simply because I'm bored enough to laugh at inane comments which flood the Internet.

I'm sad to say that due to the resources that are technology and the Internet, the English language is dying a painful death. Free thought is becoming regurgitated garbage. American English is devolving from what it once was, a bastard cousin of The King's English into some child bred out of generations of incest between backwater siblings. (Sorry, bad bit of observational humor based in my utter distaste of having grown up in the American South.) I dread to see what new phrases will emerge to take new places in the Oxford English Dictionary.

R.I.P. English Language. R.I.P.