anyone else hate the way people spell on the internet?

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hate, hate, hate it.

While lolcats-speak is "cute" and "funny", it is the least useful when compared to 1337-speak.

1337-speak is originally a custom kind of encryption used by hackers to communicate without having outsiders understand their message, and then specifically thinking about automated text processors. It has for example been used by ad-companies to promote their product in a text message that would otherwise be caught by an automated spam-filter.

While some still practice 1337-speak by adhering to the original intent of the language, it has since been overused by wannabe leets, or n00bs (derived from newbie) and the same ad-companies and turned it into something inheritely annoying.

But I personally find lolcats-speak much worse, because it has absolutely no purpose at all other than try to make me smile which it fails horribly in doing.

yes this is a problem for me as I need to focus so much in reading in the first place

So if people spell words wrong, weird or with numbers or with diffrent short lettercombinations, they make it more difficult for me

There is so many expressions I have no clue what they mean and people who use expressions like "b/c" assume everyone already knows what it means

I always write the full words and try to spell it correct as well as far as I can. Some words is difficult to spell

Yep, hate it. I shudder to think what the kids who grew up speaking like this will be like as adults.

You know, the adults that watched your generation grow up thought exactly the same.

My current signature covers this specific phenomenon:
"Even unculture is culture. Everything drives us forward, except the fear that it does not."

Last edited by Kenjuudo on 23 Sep 2009, 6:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Guy, that took me forever to read and I stlil only understood half of it.

Who says I like my generation any better?

Well, logic dictates that you need something to compare with that yields a different result in order to have a meaning behind a classification.

Last edited by Kenjuudo on 23 Sep 2009, 7:13 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Internet shorthand has its place - on the internet. It's very unlikely to spread to standard written English, but if it does, I'm sure we'll get used to it. If written English is going to change massively at some point in the near future, so be it. It's not as if English spelling is exactly logical as it is. The main point of my post is this: there's no need to worry about the future of the English language. Languages are self-sustaining and don't die just because some people miss out some letters in writing.

Nobody speaks in leet or internet abbreviations, as far as I know.

I don't think we had any kind of dumbing down of the English language. At least, not to the degree these kids are. There's ragging on your kids' music and hairstyles and there's the degeneration of IQs.

Ever see Idiocracy? Yeah, I see our future becoming much like that.

(Double post thanks to a slow forum... Deleted)

Last edited by Kenjuudo on 23 Sep 2009, 7:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yes, I've seen Idiocracy. It is a fun movie with a less than realistic prospect about our future. Everything is not just black and white, and things will balance out somewhere in the middle much rather than lead toward outright stupidity. But the current evolutionary trend is actually that kids are getting smarter and smarter in each generation. There was a recent scientific investigation into the down dumbing of the English language in modern generations, and it's results showed that the kids that used 1337-speak, not only knew the correct spelling, but actually excelled in language specific subjects as compared to other kids that did not use the jargon. I don't remember the reference.

Which is not to be confused with the similar appearing "anyone else hate the way people smell on the internet?"

Oh yes, I can't stand any of that. I ignore anyone who writes that way.

I don't like the shorthand expressions but what really ticks me off is the vast number of people who don't seem to know the difference between "your" and "you're".

Or "there" "their" and "they're".

As an Australian I tend to use proper English (British) spelling but on the internet I might use American spelling so as not to confuse our poor ret*d cousins.

Actually a lot of American spelling makes sense. "Center" rather than "centre", but I draw the line at insane words like "burglarized".

A burglar burgles. He commits burglary. My house has been burgled"

A painter paints. Are you going to say "My house has been painterized"?

Last edited by Wombat on 24 Sep 2009, 5:02 am, edited 1 time in total.

You know what really bothers me?

People who don't capitalize the beginning of sentences.

I mean, I don't capitalize the beginning of sentences when I'm on MSN, but I would at least expect people to do so on a public forum.

I notice that the title of this thread doesn't uphold that standard.