Being relatively young, I don’t tend to enjoy watching news on television. It’s boring, for one, and I can barely stay out of a coma just to watch what’s happening. So when I need some information about something, I head to the internet. After I get my dose of news, facts, or random knowledge, I tend to hang around the internet a little while longer, like a teenager waiting at the mall for their parent to give them a ride home. One thing that I have noticed in my years of web-surfing, however, is that people are getting progressively stupider. This is something that I should’ve caught early on, but it has happened at such a dinosauric pace, it’s no surprise that I hadn’t seen it.
In every chat room, message board, or blog, you’ll see it: the butchering of the English language. Words spelled incorrectly for the sake of humor; phrases shortened to three-letter words; and actions spelled out in an attempt to act them out. Normally, it’s not that big of a deal. Or at least that’s what I thought a few years ago. Now-a-days, it’s so rampant, you can’t click on a page without bumping into a “LAWL” (which is an evolved form of “LOL,” which is a shortened version of “Laughing Out Loud”).
And yes, I did mean to use “evolved;” these terms are ever-changing, and will continue to do so. Are people really getting dumber? Or are they just lazy enough to not wish to type out certain things? Sure, I can understand the use of “LOL” when something is funny. And I’ve been known to also misspell words for the sake of humor. But butchering the language that I love so much? No way. I don’t do that, son. No matter where I am on the interweb, I always try to make my words as completely understandable as humanly possible, which is becoming harder and harder as the average age of the internet-user lowers with each passing year. It seems like there are nothing but 11-year-olds out there now. Even on Xbox Live, one can still find small children cursing like grizzled war veterans while you play against them in Gears of War, an M-Rated video game. But that’s a different topic altogether.
So what can one person do to stop the “Syntax Genocide” that is happening to our language? Just follow my example, just like others do; type as best as you can, and do your best to bite your tongue when someone butchers a sentence. From what I know, people who kill words tend to get very defensive.