This is from an actual e-mail a writing teacher received from one of her adult students:
“hI KATHY i am sending u the assignmnet again,” one student wrote to her recently. “i had sent you the assignment earlier but i didnt get a respond. If u get this assgnment could u please respond . thanking u for ur cooperation.”
What’s so scary about this is that this woman teaches business writing to mid-career professionals. Not only are they mid-career professionals, they are mid-career professionals for whom English is their first language. Yes, that’s right, people who have been in the business world a minimum of five years are writing e-mails where misplaced punctuation would be a blessing over the none that is being used and verb forms routinely do not agree with the subject of the sentence. This advertisement snapped from the New York Times web site is a very good example of business “speak” that fails the good writing test.
What scares me even more is what is going to happen to written language when phrases such as “wat r u wrng 2 dinr” become the common parlance of actual adults. This is why I now declare my intentions to become a Punctuation Avenger. I will make it my mission to fight the good fight for proper grammar, subject and verb agreement, and the correct use of punctuation. The permanent marker, — Sharpie brand for me — carefully constructed stick on labels in the shape of apostrophes, and a lack of tolerance for abuse of the language shall be my weapons.
There will be no cape, though, for as we learned from The Incredibles, your cape is always your downfall as a superhero.
What in the world is up with that woman? Is she the business writing teacher formerly known as Prince?
But, I do have an inkling as to where the problem started. I blame instant messaging for the demise of the English language. It all began innocently enough, I’m sure. Some slow typist decided to abbreviate the word “ur” to “you’re” so that his girlfriend wouldn’t worry that he had died at the keyboard. Next thing you know, that one person’s laziness inspires someone else to be lazy, and so on and so on – until, finally, you end up with what we have today:
LANGUAGE ANARCHY.
Save us, Punctuation Avenger! Your time has truly come.
I suspect the poster of the previous comment is making a valid point about where, or at least how, this new form of ‘english’ developed. There are several different areas where the drive to use the minimim letters possible is very strong.
Some of it developed a long time ago, I think, among people who wrote a lot on bulletin boards over the old dreadfully slow dial-up connections; IRC chat folks, and the like. Now messaging cell phones, Blackberries and such are adding to this. The crude keyboards people now are forced to use I think are the new motive force replacing slow transmission times.
While transmission speeds could change, there is no way I can think of to make a usable tiny keyboard – fingers remain finger-sized. Really good voice recognition might be a solution. I don’t know how close this is.
One might even speak of computer chic – some varieties of which involve knowing all these potential abbreviations. And once you’ve cast spelling to the winds, punctuation (if you even knew it) follows quickly.
Ever read “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves?” 🙂
What kind of eejit puts a comma in “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”?