When I was in high school, we had a teacher – Mrs. Morris. For extra credit, we could bring in photos or cut outs of advertisements or things we saw in public that purposely spelled things incorrectly. Like “Krazy Glue,” and other similar items. I’m pretty sure, in today’s world, I could have passed that class on extra credit alone.
I have actual fear that in not-that-many-years-from-now we will all speaking in this weird shorthand that we’ve created. Maybe we’ll be speaking in 140 characters at a time that will force us to drop some words entirely to the point where we have to sound out the sentence so that we may actually understand it (yes, I have to do this with lots of the text message “shorthand”). Honestly? Most of the shorthand isn’t even that much shorter. Is it that hard to spell out Y-O-U… so hard that we have to simply put U? Really? I can’t bring myself to do it.
How did we get here? More importantly, how can we get back?
This epidemic goes far beyond my continuous grammar faux pas of starting sentences with And and But. This is serious, people. It’s a matter of saving lives!
Funny! My husband and I were just talking about this yesterday. Where ARE we headed?!
I like Mrs. Morris 🙂
I so want to just leave the comment "K" here, but I can't bring myself to do it.
And I start sentences with And and But all the time. Copywriting allows for breaking some rules of grammar. 🙂
Don't worry, it'll swing back. People will get sick of not being able to understand each other.
I don't even like when people use that shorthand text lingo in actual texts, but when I see it in emails or on Facebook it drives me NUTS! And don't even get me started on people mixing up there/they're/their or your/you're!! *lol*
Also, I find it ironic that I just commiserated on the text lingo, then followed it up with an "LOL". I make an exception for the occasional LOL, as long as you are really laughing out loud when you write it. 🙂
My daughters only skimmed over cursive writing in school. The schools feel it is obsolete. We've had to teach them on our own. Why in the world would the beautiful flow of cursive writing be obsolete?! Too much is changing in not only the words themselves but how they are written. I hope we can go back.
While I agree with you and am alarmed by how fast we're hurtling toward Idiocracy, language is fluid. Think about how difficult it is to read Shakespeare or James Joyce or Jane Austen. There is a rhythm to how they wrote and how they spoke. We certainly don't talk like that anymore. Technology has sped up the process of changes to how we communicate and how new words evolve and become common. I don't know that we have to worry about not being able to understand each other in the future though. Some of us just may cringe when the "correct" spelling for you gets changed in the Webster's to "U".