StOp Dis aWFULness

Ahhh, the week after Thanksgiving-that time when everybody is either hitting the gym to apologize for punishing their body for four days or vowing to start working out sometime before Christmas.

The holidays are a time for reflection and to look at oneself deeply. Most importantly, to reflect upon horrid habits that need shedding-such as typing “WoRdZ LIKE dis.”

Mostly found in text and instant messaging, this sort of typing is a cross between “AIM speak” – where “LOL” and “BRB” are abundantly found – and blatantly bad grammar and capitalization usage. Call me a librarian or an English teacher, but this is my biggest pet peeve. And believe me; I have a lot of pet peeves.

Most of us are not 14 anymore, and it is never OK to type like that-unless it is with “LOLcats”. “LOLcats” are basically pictures of cats doing mildly amusing things with grammatically incorrect captions. The home of “LOLcats,” icanhascheezburger.com, is the only place where I embrace grammatically bad typing.

“Text speak” is also creeping up in a new and scary place-Facebook. Every time I scroll down my list of Facebook friends, I see someone’s status saying things like: “girlZ NITE 2nite!” This is not OK. How hard is it to type out full words? It takes longer to type out the shortened, slang versions of words than it takes to actually type out the real words.

Typing like that does not make you cool – it makes people want to throw dictionaries in your general direction. If you think it adds flavor or makes what you are doing more interesting, you are incorrect.

“Text speak” is a huge problem and no one seems to be doing anything about it. True, if it is really bothersome, you could delete all your offending “friends” on Facebook, but that’s childish and besides-how would you keep tabs on people? It is just not logical. I cannot say I can provide a solution to the epidemic of “Text speak,” but, awareness should be spread.

Typing anything in “Text speak” is like not looking at what you are typing while using your T9Word program to send a text. T9Word is the program where you hit selected keys only once to spell out a word, or words. When carelessly typed, usually the message makes little to no sense-like decoding the Rosetta Stone with no historical value or reward. It has already been scientifically proven that the American people are lazy and almost completely technology dependent, so really, why not perpetuate the stereotype that we cannot bother spelling or capitalizing words correctly.

On the whole, it is much simpler to actually spell out what you want to type or text. “Text speak” was only cool in high school, and now that people still do it after leaving their teenage years is ridiculous. We took grammar classes for a reason.