Sleep? Hah.

[odditycollector]

I was just talking with a friend on msn. Good friend, interesting person, but I can't stand her typing: i no ur ther... plz ttm??? Drives me crazy.

And, perhaps because I'm going for a honourable mention at not sleeping, something very disturbing occurred to me.

Her typing makes a lot more sense than mine. Grammar aside, to promote a letter into its capital version one has to hit the shift key - that's an extra finger move. The excess punctuation, on the other hand, is obtained at hardly any redundant movement. And when one considers all the letters she doesn't bother with, it's really no surprise she's a faster typer than me.

I know my way is right. Society says so. One must uphold the dictionary in all it's weighty glory.

Except, what if I'm not? English evolves. Society evolves. Hell, there's subtle differences between spellings and usages between countries now. If the future is computers and keyboards, and I have absolute faith the future is computers, anyway - it would make no sense for us to hold on to outdated, inefficient rules. If one glances at the history of language, they see that people are lazy and have been disappearing letters whenever they thought they could get away with it.


Mark Twain knew English needed to be fixed.
So does Europe.

I think, if I ever do get to sleep, I'll have nightmares.

Comments

[yay4pikas.livejournal.com]

Sure, language evolves. But without some sort of standardization, it gets pretty confusing to actually communicate after a while. (Even as much as I love Middle English, 'seke' being used for both 'seek' and 'sick' is rather confusing, and netspeak is far, far worse, and less pretty.)

Not to mention the aesthetics of it.

Granted, I can type grammatically and with correct spelling at between 70 and 90 wpm, which is faster than most people can produce netspeak. 'S probably why I hate netspeak so much.

(trismegistus told a story a while back about overhearing a girl saying "Oh Em Gee." He finally realized that she was actually saying OMG -- which makes no sense verbally, because it's the same number of syllables. *is stick in the mud about grammar/spelling/etc.)

[odditycollector.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely. But in the twilight hours, it's disturbingly easy to imagine gods and demons and a world where netspeak has become standard.

...which makes no sense verbally, because it's the same number of syllables.
Then again, www is short for World Wide Web, nine syllables vs three. Shrugs.

[yay4pikas.livejournal.com]

Horrible indeed! *shudder*

But do people say WWW? It's like OMG in that it's shorter to type, but it's not meant to be a spoken acronym.

Most people I know just say 'internet' or 'web.'

[odditycollector.livejournal.com]

But do people say WWW?
Sure they do. Alright, mostly when pointing out a web page: "Go to double-u double-u double-u dot I'm all that dot com."
I's just amusing, is all...

[yay4pikas.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, but that's different, 'cos it's spelling. People don't say, "I'm going to look something up on the double-u double-u double-u," do they?