ferrousland.com - opinions
breeding illiterates
please, oh please, oh please! why are so many people on the internet so very bad at english? i'm not talking about people to whom english is a second (or third) language .. i admire them .. i'm talking of people who grew up with english as a first language, but still blatantly massacre it.
i love the internet. if it wasn't for having to eat & sleep, i could quite easily spend twenty-four hours a day on here. our children though (in the global sense), are going to be brought up on the internet amongst misused words such as 'your' instead of 'you're', or 'there' instead of 'their', & don't get me started on how so many people seem to think that 'there' is the same as 'they're', the abbrevaited version of 'they are'. don't let me forget to mention the definite lack of apostrophes where there should be apostrophes a-plenty, or else putting in apostrophe's [sic] just for the hell of it.
it's not just the terrible english skills that bother me. why do adult & otherwise intelligent people insist on using words like 'cuz' instead of 'because', & 'ur' instead of 'you're' or 'you are'. now, don't get me wrong. in chat rooms & on icq & similar places, abbreviations are quite necessary to be able to keep up with the pace, but do these shortcuts have to be used in full sentences on people's websites where they have more than three seconds to write a complete sentence?
before you start saying, "but what about you? you don't even use capital letters!" let me defend myself. this is a conscious decision based on creating a certain 'look' within my site .. i know how to use capitals, i choose not to use them. besides, not using capitals doesn't make text difficult to decipher.
kids learn from what they see, hear & read. the chance to express oneself on one's web site is certainly a blessing but the lack of a professional editor means that our children are going to see bad english as the norm. sure, languages change & go through a certain amount of evolution with time, but i call this de-volution. i really hope it's not our future.
i think that's the biggest think for me, too. it's not time saving when it's used in 'normal' conversation, just lazy.
Hehe, could be worse. There are people who really take their time and still come up with something illegible.
It's called l33tsp34k .. and that was only the vowels.
But I still don't get the why of the you're -> your etc. Those are the *basics*.
i have to admit that i use abbreviations like 'u' in conversations, mostly because my mind thinks at the speed of talk, but i cannot type at the speed of talk, so it's a way of keeping up with myself. i always try to write properly when i'm writing on my blog or something. not necessarily perfectly grammatical english, though.. i write it the way i would speak it, my casual 'voice'. then i also have a formal type voice which attempts to use proper grammar and structure, for letters or non-personal things.
bad spelling is one of the quickest ways for me to leave a site. i'm tolerant of typos.. i make them, and i don't always catch them. that's ok. but you can tell the difference between the occasional missed typo and bad spelling, and it really irritates me when people don't make the effort to correct themselves.
i think it's about making it easy for me to read what you want to say. if i have to try to decipher a sentence full of the wrong your/you're or they're/there/theirs, i am not going to bother, because if you don't care enough about what you're saying to say it properly, why should i?
(btw - the you in the last bit is not you specifically.. it's a general you
)
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I c u dun like 'net speak.
Hehe, it annoys me as well. I can read it , but somehow it takes something out of me. I won't let the children use it, just looks "lazy".