Text Speak

Song of the Day: 'Mother Knows Best', Tangled: Original Soundtrack

I’d think more highly of you if you knew how to spell properly.

If you refrained from shortening words like ‘you’ to ‘u’ and ‘see’ to ‘c’.

If you stopped using annoying acronyms like ‘idk’ and ‘omg’.

If your grammar wasn’t atrocious and your sentence structure a pain to read.

If you knew the differences between ‘their’, ‘there’, and ‘they’re’.

If you knew the difference between 'your' and 'you're'.

If you actually capitalized the letters at the beginning of your sentences.

If you used punctuation properly at all and, when you do, didn’t use them in excess.

Text speak is all fine and dandy if you’ve got a character limit in your cell phone, but that begs the question: why don’t you just have the conversation in person? Or actually talk on the phone? Video message? An email? Hell, write them a damn letter.

You wouldn’t turn in a paper to your English professor with this kind of crap. Why do your friends warrant choppy writing that more often than not leads to ambiguity and a lack of understanding?

Apparently, text speak such as ‘omg’, ‘lol’, and ‘fyi’ have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary (1).

Now, I’m not free from blame here, either. I do use some of these phrases frequently in my messaging. But more often than not my text speak is outweighed by the fluidity and clarity of my writing. Because I TRY.

I find it sad that we live in an age in which our communication skills are not only lacking than those of previous generations, but it's considered acceptable and often excusable. We live in a time that allows for bad grammar, improper spelling, horrendous sentence structure and an incredibly diminished vocabulary. Granted, we have online thesauruses (thesauri?) and dictionaries. Hell, we’ve got them built in to our word processing software. But outside of class assignments, those resources are rarely used by a majority of this generation. And this generation needs to more than any prior generation.

I’m not asking anyone to be Shakespeare. I’m not even asking for the correct use of ‘whom’ from time to time. I’d just appreciate it if people would realize the impact and importance of words and language and the proper uses of each.

We're losing our language. To my sister the linguist, it's part of the language process - in essence, sometimes it's okay. I complain because I don't think it should be. A lot can be said with words, but it’s not worth a damn if no one can understand it.



'A longer sentence brings no more
than one that I had said before
it's hard to compromise when I see through your eyes
it's just a common view, I guess it's lost on you.' - 'I Can Talk', Two Door Cinema Club



(1) http://www.oed.com/public/latest/latest-update/