Shameless Butchering of the English Language

(Original post: October 9, 2010)

That’s it, I can remain silent no longer. It seems to be that the majority of the facebook community could use a refresher course on how to sound like a semi-intelligent human being when typing. Look, I understand that people use abbreviations and purposely leave letters out of words to save time when texting, but how does adding more letters make texting easier? What’s up with all this double-spacing and inserting spaces where there shouldn’t be any? Or turning one word into two words, just because you can? Congrats, hundreds of thousands of dead English teachers and generally intelligent people are rolling in their graves.

For the benefit of those who may have forgotten, here’s a basic review of how to construct a sentence. It’s even in step-by-step wikiHow format, both to entertain your short attention span and because I’m going into wH withdrawal.

1. Begin with a capital letter. I realize that the effort to push the shift key might be too much for you to handle, especially if you’re updating your status from a cell phone, but if you’re typing with a keyboard, you have no excuse. Just waste another fraction of a second of your time to hit the dang shift key. Now, you do have to hit the shift key and the letter you want to capitalize at the same time, which might be difficult for you, but don’t worry, I’m sure you can get it with practice.
2. Continue with an intelligent thought, capitalizing where appropriate (names of people, places, etc). Please spell all the words correctly, and give each word only the correct number of letters, instead of repeating the last one twenty times. Same goes for chat acronyms; “OMG” is correct, but “omggggggg” is not. Do not separate compound words (believe it or not, “football” is one word. I would think hick people would know that). Do not create compound words. Yes people, “every day” is two words (in most cases; there are some exceptions, but I have yet to come across someone using the one-word form correctly). “I love you” is three words, and the I should always be capitalized. You also shouldn’t be posting this phrase, grammatically correct or otherwise, to the wall of your boyfriend of two days.
3. Separate thoughts with some form of punctuation. Since very few people who don’t already do this aren’t really capable of long, intelligent thoughts, a period should suffice once you run out of things to say. However, if you are prone to rambling, please separate ideas with commas. However, don’t overdo it. “So, guess what, I, love you!” or “Every Tueday, I go, to the grocery store” are not correct, and the comma makes you sound like it took you a while to remember how to finish the sentence you were typing because you were wiping the drool trail off your chin. If you are unsure of where to use commas, feel free to message me or anyone else whose facebook posts are occasionally worth reading. Also, please note that the punctuation goes right after the last word of your thought. There is no space there. Seriously , this is not correct , and when you type like this , intelligent people laugh at you. The only thing that could make that worse ; is when you separate thoughts with semicolons when you have no idea how to use them. Just… don’t. Semicolons are too cool for you.
4. Repeat until you have finished saying what you want to say. Please, spare us and don’t end your status or comment with a public announcement that you love so-and-so (even though you’ve only been dating for a week), or worse, that you just like someone, because nobody really gives a crap. Finish what you’re going to say, proofread it, and click “post”. Sit back and prepare for peoples’ opinions of you to improve drastically. Maybe people will stop speaking to you in person like you’re five and/or profoundly mentally retarded, because they’ve discovered that you do indeed know how to communicate like an intelligent person via text.

Now, I will throw in a quick disclaimer. I do know some intelligent people who type like this every so often for the sake of individuality or something. While reading that still freaks me out, at least I know that the person who posted it does know how to type correctly, and does so most of the time. It’s the people that truly think “everydayyyyyyyy !” is a word that I’m really worried about. Please, if you know someone like that, reach out to them. Buy them a dictionary for their next birthday. Find some way to program their cellular device to not allow them to type until they’ve capitalized the first word of the sentence (but don’t program it to do that for them… that encourages more laziness). Do whatever you have to do. Together, we can fight this mass butchering of the English language and overall deterioration of the average teenage girl’s IQ.

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