No, this isn’t a hostile missive against our friends across the Atlantic.  I’m talking about slaughtering the English language, or at least the constant attempts to do so through poor practice.  For years, I’ve argued that one of the great things about the Internet is that it has people reading and writing again.  Ever since the introduction of the telephone and television into our homes, society as a whole had been eschewing the written word for the spoken word.  The art of letter writing had been replaced by answering machine messages.  Books had been replaced by sitcoms, and the newspaper had been replaced by tabloid talk shows.  Where once we pored over the written word and studied not only content but context, we had become a people who needed information now, damnit.

In some ways, the internet has reversed the course; in others it has worsened the situation.  The speed of internet transmissions has only hastened the desire for speedy information asap and spawned its own monsters: the acronym and l33t speak.  Acronyms are sets of words of phrases from with the first letter is taken for abbreviation or emphasis, e.g. lol, wtf, brb, btw, faq, etc.  L33t-speak is the act of replacing the letters in words with other letters, numbers, or characters for purposes of style, e.g. pwned, sux0r, h4x0r, w00t, and d00dz.  Fortunately, there are many online dictionaries for both.

FYI, l33t speak has a much longer tradition than most people are aware.  It dates back to pirate bulletin board systems from the mid- to late-80s.  The term “elite” (from which “leet” and “l33t” is derived) indicated that a pirate bulletin board system featured the latest pirated software, typically 0-2 days from the date it was cracked.  When a pirate group stripped the copy protection from a title, it would add a splash screen announcing their accomplishment, their list of friends and associates, and the date on which it was released to the world.  Since few systems operated above 1200 bps, it could take hours to transfer a single title from one person to another person, thus SYSOPs that had received a title within the first 48 hrs. of its release had to be “in the know” as they would have been among the first to whom the software was sent.  These SYSOPs and their BBS’s were deemed elite.  The signature mark of these elite BBS’s were their use of abbreviations, the letter “z” in place of “s” and other character substitutions.  Software titles were referred to as “warez”, “][” was used in place of the roman numeral II, and many pirate groups wrote their typically three-initialed group names with substitute character like “]\[” in place of “N” and “]3” in place of “B.”

However, lest I come off as an ‘net basher, I should also point out that abbreviations, acronyms, and character substitutions didn’t begin with telecommunications - the advertising community has to take its fair share of the blame.  Signs have long dotted our roadways advertising “BBQ”, “Late Nite”, “Drive Thru,” “24/7,” “Stop ‘N Go,” and “4 Sale.” Many companies use misspelled words in their own company names to stand out from the crowd.  We see words like “Quik,” “Foto,” and “Snak” so often that they don’t usually register with us as misspellings when seen in 3ft tall letters.  Some, like Toys R Us, combine a misspelling with a reversed letter.  Worse than the destruction of the English language in road side signs and business names, is the often unintelligible use of abbreviations and acronyms used in classified advertising.  Each type of classified has its own set of abbreviations.  A typical real estate classified may look like “lg slr 4br 2ba fpl lr w/wtw hw dr w/d & eik fsbo.” Personal ads may be an equally cryptic jumble of letters like “dwf iso ns sbm 4 ltr & tlc.” Other advertising acronyms include “cod,” “bro,” and “sase”.  While we’re on the topic of newspaper advertisements, I should also share an interesting story on the history of “ok.” Apparently it began as a fad in newspaper offices in Boston in 1838.  At that time, newsrooms began using abbreviations for many common phrases, often using purposeful misspellings of the original words.  Most of the abbreviations lost popularity, but “ok” caught on with the l33t members of the public.  It was after the Van Buren campaign of 1840, that the abbreviation for “oll korrect” (all correct) became widespread.

Surely worse than these examples of willful obliteration are the frequent unintentional errors that pervade the written and spoken word.  One of my personal pet peeves is the recent phenomenon toward removing the objective case from the language altogether and simply replacing it with the subjective case.  It used to be that the most common mistake with the subjective case was in using the word “who” instead of the word “whom.” “Who” is used when it is the subject of the phrase such as “who threw the ball?” “Whom” is used when it is the object of the phrase as in “you threw the ball to whom.” You don’t often hear people use whom.  However, I’ve recently become cognizant of this same trend with the words “I” and “me.” Like who and whom, I is used as the subject of the phrase and me is used as the object.  I find that seemingly intelligent people are now using I in place of me.  IMHO, I feel this trend is because they think that me is an ignorant word whereas I denotes class - something along the lines of “me and Billy Bob are gonna get us some beer,” but “the sommelier presented the Millesimes cognac to Winford and I.” They’re both wrong.  As disturbing as this misuse of such a common word as I is the recent anomaly that I refer to as the “Reality TV subjective case,” named so after the alarming number of times the mistake is heard on reality television programs, I believe due to the misguided attempt to sound smart in front of hundreds of thousands of viewers.  With the “Reality TV subjective case” the speaker avoids the debate over I and me entirely and replaces both with the word “myself.” “I didn’t want to get voted out, so Richard, Sharon, and myself formed an alliance.  Little did I know, but Rob overhead Sharon telling Richard and myself that he wanted to vote out Rob.” Ugh!  A really tough drinking game would be to watch an episode of Big Brother and drink every time someone says “myself” or “strategical.”

Another common mistake is the frequent misuse of the apostrophe.  Apparently I’m not the only one to notice it as there are numerous sites dedicated to the often maligned punctuation mark.  The funny thing about the apostrophe is that it’s almost never omitted when it should have been used; quite the opposite, it’s usually inserted where it doesn’t belong.  “Oil change’s,” “Joe’s Antique’s,” and “The Jones’s” are three examples of apostrophe mistakes on signs in the neighborhood near my work.  As demonstrated by all the sites dedicated to these slipups, apostrophe errors abound.

As if the previously mentioned examples of carnage in dialogue, advertising, and reality television weren’t enough, some sites have dedicated themselves to exposing poor English in areas where one might have expected a little more diligence.  Killian Advertising features a section on their web site titled, “Cover Letters from Hell.” In it, the advertising agency provides examples of poorly written pitches for employment.  The examples range from the strange (one is written in the form of “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas") to the openly hostile (a wannabe web site designer insults their existing site layout).  The site is at times both funny and troubling.

It makes me wonder if Edward George Bulwer Lytton would still think that “the pen is mightier than the sword.” Somehow, I’d have to think that he’d be rofl at all of this.

"That is not good language which all understand not.”
George Herbert

P.S. If you were paying attention, you will notice that I interspersed each one of these grammatical issues throughout this blog entry.