I have briefly touched upon this before but the horrible takeover of the human language that is "textspeak" has in recent weeks begun to get right on my tits. The other day I passed a billboard advertising the chocolate foodstuff that is "Kitkat Chunky". The sole content of the advertisement was a picture of said product and underneath it was the legend "OMG, MY CHUNKY JUST GOT FUNKY :-)".
Now I am not for one moment suggesting that some ad agency mong on far too much money pitched it in this way (well OK I totally am) but it seems fairly obvious that the decision to go ahead with this campaign rested on the following logic:
"Everyone these days communicates via some horribly truncated and emoticon riddled SMS language, not just the young people or the stupid or those that can't spell, everyone. We are appealing to them all with this simple advert, dumbing it down for the Proles and the kids but the normals won't take offence either." Well I fucking well do ladies and gentlemen. I very much do.
There are a number of different theory's in my own head how this has been allowed to happen and not being the most educated man on Gods green earth I can only suppose which one is the truth. My gut instinct would tell me that with the advent of mobile phones that were SMS enabled came people that owned them for reasons of status and the prohibitive cost and limited character usage meant that it occurred to these people to shorten the language they used in order to be frugal. Later when cost was no longer an issue but the character constraints remained the same people still wanted the most bang for their buck and so the shortening of words and omission of vowels etc continued.
Now the point is not that I have a problem with abbreviation per say, it's the fact this has carried over into everyday usage that gets to me. Reading the average internet post these days is like trying to decipher some kind of Enigma machine transmission and let me tell you right now that I am no Alan Turing (sexual preference and long distance running skills aside obviously). I honestly spend more time trying to work out what is being said than the person writing for the sake of brevity spent composing it so for those of us not fluent surely this renders the entire operation redundant? Lest we forget, the internet, in terms of price per letter at least, is charged at a flat rate. There are no excuses when you have a keyboard at your fingertips and your broadband is paid up for the month.
Facebook, always an easy to aim for target especially when you are as lazy and/or drunk as I am, is a prime example; grown ups having tit for tat, back and forth discussions concerning how much cock they like or how bored they may be when the school holidays descend and the kids are at home or when they find some puerile internet video amusing (don't get me started on Youtube, I have an entire night put aside for a rant about that shit) have become a struggle for me to interpret. Fuck me it's torture. Let's take a little stroll down idiot lane and have a more in depth look:
yu
wot
guna
uv
ure
gota
dun
And my personal favourite:
Ov
The kicker is that when the majority of these "words" are used it's with the omission of just one letter and in a few cases no abbreviation is used at all. "ov" is composed of the same amount of letters and takes exactly the same amount of time to type as "of" yet it seems that in it's original form it just wasn't good enough to stay as it was for fear of rocking the textspeak boat.
Why not just do it right to begin with? What do you stand to lose by typing every word that you learned at school and probably still know how to spell properly, properly?
Some cunt I encountered in a pub a while ago when presented with a friends funny comment actually responded with a "LOL" out loud. Now that might seem to you to be a mistake on my part but he did say it. Out of his stupid mouth and very much out loud the word "LOL" came as spelt. He said "LOL" and nobody in his immediate presence batted an eyelid.
Personally my grammar is less than perfect, punctuation escapes me at times and my spelling does need help on occasion and that's fine. I would never for instance take the piss out of dyslexia or it's sufferers. Bad spelling is cool with me as are genuine mistakes but to be clear and honest if you go out of your way to converse in this manner when you could easily do otherwise you are an imbecile and a contributor to your present/future children's downfall.
Orwell's fictionalised version of the future in 1984 was based on the premise that if you limit language and the peoples ability to learn and convey it then you can also throttle their thought processes. Language and conversation first and foremost are concepts based on learning and thought.
Please please don't make the above a reality because of your lazyness when you already have the basic tools of your education on hand to prevent it .
LOL.
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