Wednesday Morning Ramblings

[windemere]

Right, so here's a thought for you this morning. Those of us who have been online for years, if not decades, who have a blog/twitter/FB/LinkedIn/etc account, tend to write in full grammatically sounds sentences when we post, correct? Do you also do so when text messaging on your phone, or is that the time you resort to 'text speak'? Do you type full sentences on messaging services? How about emails?

My problem is this. I use full sentences. Only when I text on my little Nokia phone do I resort to no capitals (because it's awkward to do) and shorten my sentences to the bare minimum. Occasionally I do it on a messanger service too. Never on email. Never on my blogs or other programs that require long entries. I ever try hard to avoid it on FB. I am not a teenager. I know how to spell. I feel no reason to resort to things like 'How R U?' when the real question is only four more characters.

So why is it that I keep running across adults, people who are at least a decade older than I, who cannot seem to type, write or post a full sentence if their lives depended on it? I feel strangely bookended between teens and older adults and worry what that means for our future. Are those of us in our 20s and 30s who type properly doomed to de-evolve when we hit 50? And are the teens today, who cannot seem to spell anything right, going to be the next generation of 20/30 year olds who still cannot type properly?

This worries me. And it's your Wednesday morning 'what is the world coming to' thought.

ION: I have cancelled my afternoon training session in the hope that I can get some honest to god work done today, instead of feeling like I'm wasting time. This would help my general state of 'I am never going to finish this paper' if so.

Comments

[eldanna.livejournal.com]

Excellent! Maybe you are right though; I've certainly read a fair few articles that postulate that lately. However, I don't honestly believe it's a good thing. Language does change (we keep adding words to the dictionary, others go out of fashion), but grammar doesn't change so rapidly. It is still today almost identical to what it was a century ago (at least by the academic articles from the 1870s I've been reading lately).