If you’ve ever used an internet you’ll know what I’m talking about. Facebook is a good example. It seems like people actually put an effort into making their spelling look bad. As if doing it right is somehow something to be ashamed of.
My oldest niece had impeccable spelling and grammar when she was growing up, but almost as soon as she was old enough to become active on facebook she has lapsed into using this horrible but common way of spelling words.
It makes me wonder if most of the people that talk this way are doing it because it’s the norm. And it’s how you ‘fit in’. I live in hope that people aren’t that bad at using the English language.
What do you think? Is the world of young English-as-a-first-language speakers really this bad? Or are they ‘faking’ it?
ETA: I don’t just mean using ‘u’ for ‘you’ and ‘1’ for ‘one’ and so on. I mean the seeming inability to spell words that are longer than 5 letters. Words that, for ourselves when we were that age, were easy to spell.
Hm. I guess failbook is a bad example since most people on the fails can actually spell. But hopefully you still know what I mean. You can encounter this phenomenon on most social websites where people can post comments or ‘updates’.
An actual percentage is impossible to substantiate, of course.
Because so much communication is done online these days, and so much communication is text-based, spelling has taken on a life of its own and is on its way to becoming another living language with its own ‘regional’ dialects. It’s kind of frightening, but fascinating.
Certainly a lot of people really do suck at spelling, but intentional misspelling and misuse of punctuation work to convey tone and group identification. “u r teh boss” and “cool story bro” differ in connotation from “You are the boss” and “Cool story, bro,” with the former being sarcastic and the latter more neutral. This only works if you know the typist is capable of typing correctly, though; if not, it’s kind of a crapshoot.
Then there’s groups on the net that have formed their own dialects and jargon. Gamers are the obvious ones, building acronyms and initialisms that are opaque to anyone else (“gg u pwnd em” in fast-paced games where time for typing is at a premium, or “LFG Prot Pal 6k GS link cheev” in WoW). Then there’s creepy cults like the people at icanhascheeseburger.com. Read some of the comments and try to keep your eyes from bleeding, I dare you. But it makes sense to them.
The problem comes when these pidgins are the only lesson a person receives in spelling. Then the line between intentional and unintentional misspelling gets really blurred and difficult to sort out.
My 23 year old nephew is my Facebook friend. I’ve given up reading his page because exactly 0% of his or his friends’ posts are correctly spelled. Some of them, I can’t even decipher. It makes me insane. While not as bad, his emails to me are also pretty pathetic. Today’s youth… <shakes head>
My daughter, 15, used to put several s’s at the end of words ending in “s” for a while; I have no idea why. She seems to have stopped recently, though.
Bolding mine. I think what I’m seeing is neither of those things. I recognise the kind of meant-for-effect way of talking. But what I see is a lot of text peppered with the kinds of things that grate on the typical SDMB-er - the use of the word ‘loose’ instead of ‘lose’. “Your a looser”, that kind of thing.
ETA: I guess I didn’t literally mean what percentage. More what proportion (roughly) of it is genuine lack of education, and what proportion if it is just teenagers conforming with the ‘norm’ of socialised internet.
If a high proportion of it is terrible education then it makes me sad.
Facebook won’t let you edit, so if you misspell something, you need to delete and start over. So people write a long post, notice a misspelling, and make the choice: delete and start over OR hope/assume people know what they meant. (I editted this post as I went along, constantly!)
