1
Contrived words and spelling
10 December 2010
Contrived words generally make me queasy. Yes, I know English is a language in flux and neologisms come and go with annoying frequency. But when advertising and marketing companies get into the act and redesign the language for their own ends, the result is usually fatuous at best, and embarrassingly stupid at worst.
This post was sparked after I drove behind a vehicle owned by a local radio station. On the back it advertised playing "lite hits". Lite? Lite is an abomination, a word made by illiterates. If the company can't spell a simple word like light properly, then it suggests their entire production has major flaws. "Lite" beer is not light; it's simply crap. That's what "lite" connotes: substandard.
Would you trust a vehicle advertised as a "kar" or a truk"? Would you buy software labelled as an "oper8ing" system? Would you trust your family's safety to a smoke "deetector"? Why would you think a radio station with "lite" music would be any better? Would you trust your cultural tastes to them?
Lite is properly a suffix (from the Greek, lithos), meaning stone, as in coprolite. The use of "lite" as an adjective and homonym for light was first used by an advertising firm in 1962, and has, like other egregious misspellings, been in use ever since. Similar misspellings are "brite" and "nite"; neither of which can hearken back to any classical form, and are merely insufferably bad.
I got a flyer in the mail recently advertising "HY-GRADE ROOFING" (which is also written "Hy-Grade Roofing"). Come on: if you can't spell "high" how do you expect me to put any faith in your ability to repair my roof? Unless the owner's name is Hy (as in Hyman), it's a glaring error that immediately made me put that company on the "never use these folks" list. That wasn't the only mistake on that flyer, by the way - there were too many to name here without sounding like a pedant. Or more of one that I'm sounding now.
Another recent trend from marketing geeks is to misspell plural words with a "z" rather than of the correct "s" as if the word was written by someone whose first language was not English, and still working through Chapter One of the "English as She is Spoke" textbook. That gave us such nonsense as Bratz Babyz, Bratz Babyz Ponyz, Bratz Boyz, or Bratz Sportz (note the double mistake of not changing the y in baby and pony). Similarly marketing morons use ph instead of f - Phat Boyz, Phat Girlz, Baby Phat, Phat Farm. These are so cloying they stick in my throat.
Marketing geeks think that deliberately incorrect spelling makes a product look cool, hip and exciting - instead of boringly over-used and commonplace as it has become. The acceptance of crass misspelling is just another indicator of the rapidly declining rate of literacy in our culture.
The technical term for much of this word abuse is not, as you might suspect, "stupid, illiterate advertising gimmicks" or "illiterate teenagers who can't spell" but rather "metaplasmus," which is defined as "a type of neologism in which misspelling a word creates a rhetorical effect."
Okay, what that means is that, if you're writing about someone with a southern accent, you might write "dawg" instead of "dog." Or you might add -age to the end of a word to indicate something bigger, like "sportage" or "beerage". To make it less important, you might add -let or -ling: hireling or booklet have come into play that way. Add -ette to the end of a word to make it feminine: "smurfette." To make something futuristic and mean, add -ator as in terminator. To define someone as a follower, adherent or descendant, we add the suffix "-ite" as in Israelite or Carrierite.
It's an old, and well-used tool in our language to change the emphasis or tone of words. It can create some fun words, often that appear for a short period as cultural slang - shagadelic for example.
But most of these terms are short-lived because they relate to a current pop theme that, like political humour, dates itself very quickly. References to the 1999 Austin Powers quotes seem almost quaintly out-of-date today, like using "groovy" and "daddy-o" in a conversation. It's like bureaucratic bafflegab or political gobbledygook: it rarely stays current (two perfectly good neologisms that have stood the test of time, coined in 1952 and 1944, respectively).
The Web has spun its own sub-language of acronyms and initialisms, many of which have endured or crossed over to cell-phone use - like LOL for "laughing out loud," "IMHO" for "in my humble opinion" and "BTW" for "by the way." Many of these are really extensions into new technology of an old and well-used system of shorthand - used in business, by students and journalists for decades, if not centuries. I remember seeing "TTFN" - "ta ta for now" above signatures on letters when I was a child. The pervasive use of English has meant that similar initialisms in other languages have not caught on or been replaced by the English version - like mdr (mort de rire - death by laughing) in French.
A lot of Net verbiage has multiple definitions, so the real meaning has to be intuited or deciphered, slowing comprehension and communication - LOL can also mean "lots of love." Does this extend the language, or deflate it? The latter, if the meaning have to be parsed from context rather than being immediately clear.
The Internet is also a breeding ground for slang - which is far too often merely bad language and bad spelling pretending to be pop street chatter. Slang can too easily expose the poverty of our education, rather than express the richness of our culture. It's not that slang, per se, is bad, but that slang's collateral baggage is bad grammar, bad spelling and bad punctuation which deteriorate our communication skills rather than enhance them. Thanks to the ubiquitousness of the Net, slang threatens to overtake proper English by sheer volume of use (or, rather, abuse), which results in worse and murkier, not better, clearer or faster, communication.
Slang before modern media tended to be regionally localized (as in Cockney), giving it some panache. Now it's spread worldwide and millions of people accept your instead of you're (and vice versa), or ur instead of either and many people seem incapable of understanding the difference between these homonyms. Netspeak is like a low-quality variety of Orwell's Newspeak, from 1984. But at least in Orwell's novel, the characters could both spell and craft a grammatically correct sentence, even with their limited vocabulary. Online, people who struggle with punctuation merely give up and drop it, along with capitalization, vowels and sentence structure. The fact that others don't correct it or comment on it tells me it's increasingly acceptable to be illiterate.
While neologisms can be entertaining and have cultural or temporal relevance, sometimes they're just bad writing masquerading as meaning. As in the new "texting" sub-form that uses misspelling, poor or lack of punctuation, and grammatical abominations to appear hip. Instead, it merely looks illiterate and uneducated. But its use has spread outside cell phones and come back online - where cost (the original driving force of texting sub-language) is not an issue.*
When E. E. Cummings wrote his poems, he eschewed most capitalization and punctuation to make an artistic point with his style. But he was a consummate and highly literate artist. Text-messagers are not in his league. "c u l8r O 2moro" cannot be compared with a crafted structure like:
I read this on a forum offering advice to someone with a technical problem with software:
My "ur" system was a TRS-80, back in the late 70s. It could never run software I use today, let alone Windows 7. After that it was an Atari 800, again well
before our current level of software existence. My post-ur computers, in the late 80s and early 90s were PCs. Is the writer referring to an early IBM? How can I adjust something I no longer have?
I didn't have an "ur" life, as the writer suggests that will be "much easy", unless of course we're talking about some sort of reincarnation, in which case, it would have been in Sumeria, whence the word Ur refers to a city. And how can anything be "much easy" - doesn't it have to be either "very easy" or "much easier"? "much easy" makes no sense.
"u know wr"? I feel like Franklin lost on the ice when I read that. "u" as in university? Unknown? Unacceptable? Uppsala? Undone? Udder? Ulcerous? And is "u" as a standalone letter properly pronounced "oo" as in Yalu? Hindu? CANDU? Is "wr" a short form for war? For warez? Wrangle? Wire? Wrest? Winner? Winter? Write? Wide receiver? For some foreign province or state? A name like Wright or Wrigley? World record? Wasserman reaction? The Wolf-Rayet galaxy?
So is he asking "Uppsala know Wright"? "University know wide receiver"? Unknown know warez? Who or what is "oo"? Is it "oo know Wolf-Rayet"? Am I missing out on some important technical advice that relates to a distant galaxy? Yes, yes, of course I can understand it - but my point is that it takes longer to decipher this gibberish into real English than had the author written it correctly. The way it was written is open to interpretation - and thus confusion.
Over on our local Enterprise-Bulletin site, there is a link to "UR Collingwood" - the capital letters suggest an initialism or acronym (like NASA or IBM) rather than the commonly used Net abbreviation, so the first question anyone has to ask is "what do the letters U and R stand for?" Net slang uses lowercase ur to suggest "your" and "you are" but can also mean "unintentional racism" depending on context. Capitalize it and it changes form to suggest something else - but what? The EB isn't saying. To me, "UR" Collingwood would be dated before 1858. Is that what they mean?
The word "ur" has a real definition outside the illiterati, meaning primitive or original (from that reference to the Sumerian city). We risk losing that important definition if we accept slang like "ur" - especially on an official or professional Web site. I was brought up to believe journalists - and their newspapers - have a responsibility to preserve and protect the language, not cater to its lower (and incorrect) forms. If a newspaper accepts "UR" as a proper word (even if it should be written "ur"), what's next? Starting editorials with IMHO? Ending them with LMAO? Ignoring noun-subject agreements? Calling something "pretty unique" or "very unique"? (the Grammar Blog shows examples of this deterioration of newspaper credibility already in play)
Here are two actual examples of messages, pulled from Facebook (a haven for illiterates, it often seems):
I can actually read Spanish - in my bumbling and simplistic way - more easily than the above. And these snippets are from Myspace:
And other examples from various forums and sites:
Need I point out that today, almost every forum or online message board has a spell check feature? Most browsers have one as either an add-on (IESpell for Internet Explorer), or built in (as with Goggle's Chrome browser). Are these writers unaware of that feature? Or simply ignore it? Of course, there is no grammar and punctuation checker to help cudgel these posts into anything even close to English.
You'll love this one, taken from Yahoo:
There's a wonderful irony in the last line - the original poster's reply to the response she received. However, I suspect that is lost on her.
More to the point, I suspect this is the future of the language, rather than merely an example of the decline of our language and education. Wells predicted it in The Time Machine: we are becoming a world of Morlocks and Eloi. But today's Morlocks have cell phones and Facebook pages.
~~~~~
* Texting is more properly known as "SMS" or "short messaging service" language. As Wikipedia notes, "SMS language or Textese (also known as txtese, chatspeak, txt, txtspk, txtk, txto, texting language, or txt talk) is a term for the abbreviations and slang most commonly used due to the necessary brevity of mobile phone text messaging, in particular the widespread SMS (short message standard) communication protocol. SMS language is also common on the Internet, including in e-mail and instant messaging. It can be likened to a rebus, which uses pictures and single letters or numbers to represent whole words (e.g. "i <3 u" which uses the pictogram of a heart for love, and the letter u replaces you).
For words which have no common abbreviation, users most commonly remove the vowels from a word, and the reader is required to interpret a string of consonants by re-adding the vowels (e.g. dictionary becomes dctnry and keyboard becomes kybrd). The reader must interpret the abbreviated words depending on the context in which it is used, as there are many examples of words or phrases which use the same abbreviations (e.g., lol could mean laugh out loud or lots of love, and cryn could mean crayon or cryin(g)). So if someone says ttyl, lol they probably mean talk to you later, lots of love not talk to you later, laugh out loud, and if someone says omg, lol they probably mean oh my god, laugh out loud not oh my god, lots of love. Context is key when interpreting textese, and it is precisely this shortfall which critics cite as a reason not to use it (although the English language in general, like most other languages, has many words that have different meanings in different contexts). SMS language does not always obey or follow standard grammar, and additionally the words used are not usually found in standard dictionaries or recognized by language academies.
The advent of predictive text input and smartphones featuring full QWERTY keyboards may contribute to a reduction in the use of SMS language, although this has not yet been noted.
The objective of SMS language is to use the least number of characters needed to convey a comprehensible message, also as many telecommunication companies have an SMS character limit, another benefit of SMS language is to reduce the character count of a message, hence, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization are largely ignored.
The dialect has a few hieroglyphs (codes comprehensible to initiates) and a range of face symbols. According to a study, though it is faster to write it takes more time to read than normal English. According to research done by Dr. Nanagh Kemp of University of Tasmania, the evolution of ‘textese’ is inherently coupled to a strong grasp of grammar and phonetics."
For a witty but caustic comment on texting and English, read John Humphrey's article, I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language.
This post was sparked after I drove behind a vehicle owned by a local radio station. On the back it advertised playing "lite hits". Lite? Lite is an abomination, a word made by illiterates. If the company can't spell a simple word like light properly, then it suggests their entire production has major flaws. "Lite" beer is not light; it's simply crap. That's what "lite" connotes: substandard.
Would you trust a vehicle advertised as a "kar" or a truk"? Would you buy software labelled as an "oper8ing" system? Would you trust your family's safety to a smoke "deetector"? Why would you think a radio station with "lite" music would be any better? Would you trust your cultural tastes to them?
Lite is properly a suffix (from the Greek, lithos), meaning stone, as in coprolite. The use of "lite" as an adjective and homonym for light was first used by an advertising firm in 1962, and has, like other egregious misspellings, been in use ever since. Similar misspellings are "brite" and "nite"; neither of which can hearken back to any classical form, and are merely insufferably bad.
I got a flyer in the mail recently advertising "HY-GRADE ROOFING" (which is also written "Hy-Grade Roofing"). Come on: if you can't spell "high" how do you expect me to put any faith in your ability to repair my roof? Unless the owner's name is Hy (as in Hyman), it's a glaring error that immediately made me put that company on the "never use these folks" list. That wasn't the only mistake on that flyer, by the way - there were too many to name here without sounding like a pedant. Or more of one that I'm sounding now.
Another recent trend from marketing geeks is to misspell plural words with a "z" rather than of the correct "s" as if the word was written by someone whose first language was not English, and still working through Chapter One of the "English as She is Spoke" textbook. That gave us such nonsense as Bratz Babyz, Bratz Babyz Ponyz, Bratz Boyz, or Bratz Sportz (note the double mistake of not changing the y in baby and pony). Similarly marketing morons use ph instead of f - Phat Boyz, Phat Girlz, Baby Phat, Phat Farm. These are so cloying they stick in my throat.
Marketing geeks think that deliberately incorrect spelling makes a product look cool, hip and exciting - instead of boringly over-used and commonplace as it has become. The acceptance of crass misspelling is just another indicator of the rapidly declining rate of literacy in our culture.
The technical term for much of this word abuse is not, as you might suspect, "stupid, illiterate advertising gimmicks" or "illiterate teenagers who can't spell" but rather "metaplasmus," which is defined as "a type of neologism in which misspelling a word creates a rhetorical effect."
Okay, what that means is that, if you're writing about someone with a southern accent, you might write "dawg" instead of "dog." Or you might add -age to the end of a word to indicate something bigger, like "sportage" or "beerage". To make it less important, you might add -let or -ling: hireling or booklet have come into play that way. Add -ette to the end of a word to make it feminine: "smurfette." To make something futuristic and mean, add -ator as in terminator. To define someone as a follower, adherent or descendant, we add the suffix "-ite" as in Israelite or Carrierite.
It's an old, and well-used tool in our language to change the emphasis or tone of words. It can create some fun words, often that appear for a short period as cultural slang - shagadelic for example.
But most of these terms are short-lived because they relate to a current pop theme that, like political humour, dates itself very quickly. References to the 1999 Austin Powers quotes seem almost quaintly out-of-date today, like using "groovy" and "daddy-o" in a conversation. It's like bureaucratic bafflegab or political gobbledygook: it rarely stays current (two perfectly good neologisms that have stood the test of time, coined in 1952 and 1944, respectively).
The Web has spun its own sub-language of acronyms and initialisms, many of which have endured or crossed over to cell-phone use - like LOL for "laughing out loud," "IMHO" for "in my humble opinion" and "BTW" for "by the way." Many of these are really extensions into new technology of an old and well-used system of shorthand - used in business, by students and journalists for decades, if not centuries. I remember seeing "TTFN" - "ta ta for now" above signatures on letters when I was a child. The pervasive use of English has meant that similar initialisms in other languages have not caught on or been replaced by the English version - like mdr (mort de rire - death by laughing) in French.
A lot of Net verbiage has multiple definitions, so the real meaning has to be intuited or deciphered, slowing comprehension and communication - LOL can also mean "lots of love." Does this extend the language, or deflate it? The latter, if the meaning have to be parsed from context rather than being immediately clear.
The Internet is also a breeding ground for slang - which is far too often merely bad language and bad spelling pretending to be pop street chatter. Slang can too easily expose the poverty of our education, rather than express the richness of our culture. It's not that slang, per se, is bad, but that slang's collateral baggage is bad grammar, bad spelling and bad punctuation which deteriorate our communication skills rather than enhance them. Thanks to the ubiquitousness of the Net, slang threatens to overtake proper English by sheer volume of use (or, rather, abuse), which results in worse and murkier, not better, clearer or faster, communication.
Slang before modern media tended to be regionally localized (as in Cockney), giving it some panache. Now it's spread worldwide and millions of people accept your instead of you're (and vice versa), or ur instead of either and many people seem incapable of understanding the difference between these homonyms. Netspeak is like a low-quality variety of Orwell's Newspeak, from 1984. But at least in Orwell's novel, the characters could both spell and craft a grammatically correct sentence, even with their limited vocabulary. Online, people who struggle with punctuation merely give up and drop it, along with capitalization, vowels and sentence structure. The fact that others don't correct it or comment on it tells me it's increasingly acceptable to be illiterate.
While neologisms can be entertaining and have cultural or temporal relevance, sometimes they're just bad writing masquerading as meaning. As in the new "texting" sub-form that uses misspelling, poor or lack of punctuation, and grammatical abominations to appear hip. Instead, it merely looks illiterate and uneducated. But its use has spread outside cell phones and come back online - where cost (the original driving force of texting sub-language) is not an issue.*
When E. E. Cummings wrote his poems, he eschewed most capitalization and punctuation to make an artistic point with his style. But he was a consummate and highly literate artist. Text-messagers are not in his league. "c u l8r O 2moro" cannot be compared with a crafted structure like:
Quote
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did
Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did
Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
I read this on a forum offering advice to someone with a technical problem with software:
Quote
Try This
Adjust ur system visual effects to 'adjust for best performance' in windows 7
ur life will be much easy
I hope u know wr to find this setting
Adjust ur system visual effects to 'adjust for best performance' in windows 7
ur life will be much easy
I hope u know wr to find this setting
My "ur" system was a TRS-80, back in the late 70s. It could never run software I use today, let alone Windows 7. After that it was an Atari 800, again well
before our current level of software existence. My post-ur computers, in the late 80s and early 90s were PCs. Is the writer referring to an early IBM? How can I adjust something I no longer have?
I didn't have an "ur" life, as the writer suggests that will be "much easy", unless of course we're talking about some sort of reincarnation, in which case, it would have been in Sumeria, whence the word Ur refers to a city. And how can anything be "much easy" - doesn't it have to be either "very easy" or "much easier"? "much easy" makes no sense.
"u know wr"? I feel like Franklin lost on the ice when I read that. "u" as in university? Unknown? Unacceptable? Uppsala? Undone? Udder? Ulcerous? And is "u" as a standalone letter properly pronounced "oo" as in Yalu? Hindu? CANDU? Is "wr" a short form for war? For warez? Wrangle? Wire? Wrest? Winner? Winter? Write? Wide receiver? For some foreign province or state? A name like Wright or Wrigley? World record? Wasserman reaction? The Wolf-Rayet galaxy?
So is he asking "Uppsala know Wright"? "University know wide receiver"? Unknown know warez? Who or what is "oo"? Is it "oo know Wolf-Rayet"? Am I missing out on some important technical advice that relates to a distant galaxy? Yes, yes, of course I can understand it - but my point is that it takes longer to decipher this gibberish into real English than had the author written it correctly. The way it was written is open to interpretation - and thus confusion.
Over on our local Enterprise-Bulletin site, there is a link to "UR Collingwood" - the capital letters suggest an initialism or acronym (like NASA or IBM) rather than the commonly used Net abbreviation, so the first question anyone has to ask is "what do the letters U and R stand for?" Net slang uses lowercase ur to suggest "your" and "you are" but can also mean "unintentional racism" depending on context. Capitalize it and it changes form to suggest something else - but what? The EB isn't saying. To me, "UR" Collingwood would be dated before 1858. Is that what they mean?
The word "ur" has a real definition outside the illiterati, meaning primitive or original (from that reference to the Sumerian city). We risk losing that important definition if we accept slang like "ur" - especially on an official or professional Web site. I was brought up to believe journalists - and their newspapers - have a responsibility to preserve and protect the language, not cater to its lower (and incorrect) forms. If a newspaper accepts "UR" as a proper word (even if it should be written "ur"), what's next? Starting editorials with IMHO? Ending them with LMAO? Ignoring noun-subject agreements? Calling something "pretty unique" or "very unique"? (the Grammar Blog shows examples of this deterioration of newspaper credibility already in play)
Here are two actual examples of messages, pulled from Facebook (a haven for illiterates, it often seems):
Quote
well..........i will nvr forget the moment when whole of our group entered to sir javed hayat's klass jxt 5 mins before the ending of klass..............lol............wat a scene......sir javed hayat kitna hairan ty.............shAry
welll...i cant 4get dat moment wen mam mahpara attended sir jamal'z klasss...n me n khushboo were laughing...n she said ...u people may leav da klasss n laugh outside da KLASSS....hahahahaha
welll...i cant 4get dat moment wen mam mahpara attended sir jamal'z klasss...n me n khushboo were laughing...n she said ...u people may leav da klasss n laugh outside da KLASSS....hahahahaha
I can actually read Spanish - in my bumbling and simplistic way - more easily than the above. And these snippets are from Myspace:
Quote
supp my homo tay-dog
heh new name for you XD
im about to go to tae kwondooooooo gots graaadingg. i walked to oakhill shops and this yr 7 tried to tell me off at the park. im at the swings and shes like, im on the swings, thats directed at the cherry brook girl. and im like wtf? youll break them coz your so faat. she was kinda fat. im boooooooooreddd. and i have money now! Yeeeeeyyyy XD i bought james's going away present =] im still busy with it. and i got charlottes. i wanna work at the iga coz i can walk there every arvo...
yeah. hmmmm. you coming to teags tomorrow? ill be at school l8 cozz im going to towers with mum XD yeeeeyyy i need to by a small box. lol olivia doesnt like james coz he called her lisa LOL.
yooosh its like 5:40 now. i need to leave in twenty minutes.
cyyaa homo tay-dog
lol homo that makes libby a man. guess it would explain alot :P
nah jks love you libby chan!!!
-sigh- im tired aaas AND I FINALLY GOT THE TV BACK WOOOOOOO. yeahhh. hm. id better go get reeeeadyy
ccyaa taaaay hows your sleep pattern going?
sayonara, adeuis,
ttyl
nixii
COMMMENT ME MOOOOOOOOO Te@.jan
MR DRAGON MAN!!!!!
thanx for the comment!!!
haha
how coolies
too bad u didnt come to gala day >
but ur coming on friday right???
it was fun but a tad boring?
if that makes sense???
oh and you didn't spell my name right...
it's TEAGAN
LMAO
heh new name for you XD
im about to go to tae kwondooooooo gots graaadingg. i walked to oakhill shops and this yr 7 tried to tell me off at the park. im at the swings and shes like, im on the swings, thats directed at the cherry brook girl. and im like wtf? youll break them coz your so faat. she was kinda fat. im boooooooooreddd. and i have money now! Yeeeeeyyyy XD i bought james's going away present =] im still busy with it. and i got charlottes. i wanna work at the iga coz i can walk there every arvo...
yeah. hmmmm. you coming to teags tomorrow? ill be at school l8 cozz im going to towers with mum XD yeeeeyyy i need to by a small box. lol olivia doesnt like james coz he called her lisa LOL.
yooosh its like 5:40 now. i need to leave in twenty minutes.
cyyaa homo tay-dog
lol homo that makes libby a man. guess it would explain alot :P
nah jks love you libby chan!!!
-sigh- im tired aaas AND I FINALLY GOT THE TV BACK WOOOOOOO. yeahhh. hm. id better go get reeeeadyy
ccyaa taaaay hows your sleep pattern going?
sayonara, adeuis,
ttyl
nixii
COMMMENT ME MOOOOOOOOO Te@.jan
MR DRAGON MAN!!!!!
thanx for the comment!!!
haha
how coolies
too bad u didnt come to gala day >
but ur coming on friday right???
it was fun but a tad boring?
if that makes sense???
oh and you didn't spell my name right...
it's TEAGAN
LMAO
And other examples from various forums and sites:
Quote
rythm problem
hello all
i asking what kind of exercice can i do to ameliorate rythm comprhension ?
hello all
i asking what kind of exercice can i do to ameliorate rythm comprhension ?
Need I point out that today, almost every forum or online message board has a spell check feature? Most browsers have one as either an add-on (IESpell for Internet Explorer), or built in (as with Goggle's Chrome browser). Are these writers unaware of that feature? Or simply ignore it? Of course, there is no grammar and punctuation checker to help cudgel these posts into anything even close to English.
You'll love this one, taken from Yahoo:
Quote
cheated on my bf and i need some advice on what to do.?
Ive ben wit my bf fo 5 n a 1/2 yrs.he'd play his ps3 for 15-18 hrs a day evryday.his sex drive went down so i tried 2 spice it up by gettin some lingerie.Evrytime i put it on n surprised him wit it he literally laughed at me n said i ws being cute n went 2 bed.My self esteem was so low i thought i ws this nasty person that he wldnt touch wit a 10 ft pole.ive ben wit him since i was 14 n he was 18.he is my 1st love n he took my virginity.when i tried 2 talk 2 him about how i was feelin he said i was over reactin n a jealous B****.My friend showed me myyearbook.com all i wntd ws some1 2 talk 2.so i signed up, this guy found me on there n we strtd 2 talk.ther was nvr ne mention of ne thing sexual so i thought he ws a cool guy i wld b ok wit hangin out.so i went 2 his aprtment 2 watch a movie.when i got ther he shut th door b4 i knew it he strtd kissin me n pickd me up n put me on his bed.th hole time i was scared.i didn no wat 2 do.he ws a big guy n i didn no if i tol him 2 stop havin sex wit me if he'd rape me r not.i nvr evr meant 4 it 2 happen n i regret all of it.after words i left cause i cldn take b ing around him ne longer.i cried n cried on th way 2 my sis’s cause i cldn bear th though of wat just happend.This guy didn rape me but i still didn wnt him 2 do it.i was just so scared tht if i tried 2 stop him i wld get hurt.my bf was on a trip 2 kentucky tht day n he came hme th next day.he strtd fighting wit me as soon as he walked n th door.so i new it wasn going 2 work out.i movd out wit a friend (a girl) a cpl days later.my plan was 2 come bak 2 him after a few months of b ing away so he would realize how bad he was treatin me.a cpl wks after i left he came 2 my sis’s 2 talk 2 me n tol me how hes doin ok n how he was goin 2 th clubs n he met 3 girls brung 1of them home n how he goes 2 th others house.it was my fault tht i didn tell him my plan n th 1st place.i tol him b4 i left tht i nvr wanted 2 c him again r talk 2 him.i nvr meant ne of it.i just thought by tellin him tht he wld thnk i was serious.after he had tol me tht i thought he was movin on.he didn want me ne more.so instead of being at home depressed i tried 2 move on 2.i met this guy through my sisters bf.he came 2 my 20th birthday party at my new apartment.i got really drunk n i slept with him.he had told me that him n his gf broke up, n he said this righ infron of my 2 sisters so i have witnesses.the next morning i get a knock on the door n low n behold it was this guy gf.they nvr broke up he lied 2 me.a cpl days l8r this guy tht hung around my sis's apartment building had been hitting on me since i had left my bf.i thought he liked me cuz he didn try ne thing.so he wanted 2 come over n watch a movie.i let him in we started 2watch a movie n he started kissin on me.i slept with him tht night.we started dating for a cpl weeks n come 2 find out he was only using me as a booty call so it ended.another guy in my sis's buildin was hittin on me all the time n he had problems with his gf.well ne way they broke up n he wanted 2 fix me dinner so i let him come ovr n he ended up stayin the night.we slept 2gether so i thought we were 2gether.he stayed th night every day for about a wk.then 1 nite his baby mama txt my cell n said she needs his help with the kids, she ws drunk and cldnt watch them herself.tht was the las night i saw him.i didn know what was happening 2 me.i nvr n my life acted like this b4.it wsnt me i felt like a totally diff.person.I hated it!a cpl days l8r i go 2 my sisters 2 pick her up cause we were headed 2our hometown 2get a mutual friend.he was also my ex bf's friend.so we went 2 get him n bring him down 4 the wknd. it had been 2 mo.since i left my bf.i was gettin hi n drinkin th whole time i was gne.whn i went 2 my sisters 2 pick her up my ex bf was ther with 1 of his friends that was friends wit my sis n her bf.c n him brung back all th feelings i had 4 him.we left 2 go 2 our home town n we came back with the friend we stayed for a while n hung out wit every1 n i was tired so i went home wit this friend.we watched a movie n i told him i was goin bed.i went 2 my room 2 get him a blanket so he could sleep on the couch.i turned around 2 head back 2 th livin room n he was right there.now i have a king size bed so i figured itd b ok cuz he can sleep on that side and id sleep on the outside.i fell asleep for about 2 hours and was woken up 2 him rubbin on me, i was facin away from him n had just woke up so my first thought was my ex bf was behind me.i finally faced him n realized it was th friend but by tht time i was 2 caught up n th moment so i went wit it ne way.i cldn't believe wat i was doing so I wsnt n2 it.the next day i txt my ex bf which i had been the whole 2 months but he nvr txt back but this time he did.we hung out all day long n was tellin eachother what we had been doin.
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well the apartments my sis live n they all cn't keep things 2 themselves so of course that day he went ovr ther he heard everythin i had done with all the guys.he knew about me cheatin b4.we talked n he stayed th nite.so he offered me 2 move back n.now all we do is talk about each of th guys.i regret the whole 2 mo.i was gne.i will nvr leave him r cheat on him evr again.i believe we cn work through this nd he wants 2 too.
16 minutes ago
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if you dont take the time to read it then your opinion obviously dont matter to me! you have to know all the details before you can give someone advice so don't be stupid!
Ive ben wit my bf fo 5 n a 1/2 yrs.he'd play his ps3 for 15-18 hrs a day evryday.his sex drive went down so i tried 2 spice it up by gettin some lingerie.Evrytime i put it on n surprised him wit it he literally laughed at me n said i ws being cute n went 2 bed.My self esteem was so low i thought i ws this nasty person that he wldnt touch wit a 10 ft pole.ive ben wit him since i was 14 n he was 18.he is my 1st love n he took my virginity.when i tried 2 talk 2 him about how i was feelin he said i was over reactin n a jealous B****.My friend showed me myyearbook.com all i wntd ws some1 2 talk 2.so i signed up, this guy found me on there n we strtd 2 talk.ther was nvr ne mention of ne thing sexual so i thought he ws a cool guy i wld b ok wit hangin out.so i went 2 his aprtment 2 watch a movie.when i got ther he shut th door b4 i knew it he strtd kissin me n pickd me up n put me on his bed.th hole time i was scared.i didn no wat 2 do.he ws a big guy n i didn no if i tol him 2 stop havin sex wit me if he'd rape me r not.i nvr evr meant 4 it 2 happen n i regret all of it.after words i left cause i cldn take b ing around him ne longer.i cried n cried on th way 2 my sis’s cause i cldn bear th though of wat just happend.This guy didn rape me but i still didn wnt him 2 do it.i was just so scared tht if i tried 2 stop him i wld get hurt.my bf was on a trip 2 kentucky tht day n he came hme th next day.he strtd fighting wit me as soon as he walked n th door.so i new it wasn going 2 work out.i movd out wit a friend (a girl) a cpl days later.my plan was 2 come bak 2 him after a few months of b ing away so he would realize how bad he was treatin me.a cpl wks after i left he came 2 my sis’s 2 talk 2 me n tol me how hes doin ok n how he was goin 2 th clubs n he met 3 girls brung 1of them home n how he goes 2 th others house.it was my fault tht i didn tell him my plan n th 1st place.i tol him b4 i left tht i nvr wanted 2 c him again r talk 2 him.i nvr meant ne of it.i just thought by tellin him tht he wld thnk i was serious.after he had tol me tht i thought he was movin on.he didn want me ne more.so instead of being at home depressed i tried 2 move on 2.i met this guy through my sisters bf.he came 2 my 20th birthday party at my new apartment.i got really drunk n i slept with him.he had told me that him n his gf broke up, n he said this righ infron of my 2 sisters so i have witnesses.the next morning i get a knock on the door n low n behold it was this guy gf.they nvr broke up he lied 2 me.a cpl days l8r this guy tht hung around my sis's apartment building had been hitting on me since i had left my bf.i thought he liked me cuz he didn try ne thing.so he wanted 2 come over n watch a movie.i let him in we started 2watch a movie n he started kissin on me.i slept with him tht night.we started dating for a cpl weeks n come 2 find out he was only using me as a booty call so it ended.another guy in my sis's buildin was hittin on me all the time n he had problems with his gf.well ne way they broke up n he wanted 2 fix me dinner so i let him come ovr n he ended up stayin the night.we slept 2gether so i thought we were 2gether.he stayed th night every day for about a wk.then 1 nite his baby mama txt my cell n said she needs his help with the kids, she ws drunk and cldnt watch them herself.tht was the las night i saw him.i didn know what was happening 2 me.i nvr n my life acted like this b4.it wsnt me i felt like a totally diff.person.I hated it!a cpl days l8r i go 2 my sisters 2 pick her up cause we were headed 2our hometown 2get a mutual friend.he was also my ex bf's friend.so we went 2 get him n bring him down 4 the wknd. it had been 2 mo.since i left my bf.i was gettin hi n drinkin th whole time i was gne.whn i went 2 my sisters 2 pick her up my ex bf was ther with 1 of his friends that was friends wit my sis n her bf.c n him brung back all th feelings i had 4 him.we left 2 go 2 our home town n we came back with the friend we stayed for a while n hung out wit every1 n i was tired so i went home wit this friend.we watched a movie n i told him i was goin bed.i went 2 my room 2 get him a blanket so he could sleep on the couch.i turned around 2 head back 2 th livin room n he was right there.now i have a king size bed so i figured itd b ok cuz he can sleep on that side and id sleep on the outside.i fell asleep for about 2 hours and was woken up 2 him rubbin on me, i was facin away from him n had just woke up so my first thought was my ex bf was behind me.i finally faced him n realized it was th friend but by tht time i was 2 caught up n th moment so i went wit it ne way.i cldn't believe wat i was doing so I wsnt n2 it.the next day i txt my ex bf which i had been the whole 2 months but he nvr txt back but this time he did.we hung out all day long n was tellin eachother what we had been doin.
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well the apartments my sis live n they all cn't keep things 2 themselves so of course that day he went ovr ther he heard everythin i had done with all the guys.he knew about me cheatin b4.we talked n he stayed th nite.so he offered me 2 move back n.now all we do is talk about each of th guys.i regret the whole 2 mo.i was gne.i will nvr leave him r cheat on him evr again.i believe we cn work through this nd he wants 2 too.
16 minutes ago
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if you dont take the time to read it then your opinion obviously dont matter to me! you have to know all the details before you can give someone advice so don't be stupid!
There's a wonderful irony in the last line - the original poster's reply to the response she received. However, I suspect that is lost on her.
More to the point, I suspect this is the future of the language, rather than merely an example of the decline of our language and education. Wells predicted it in The Time Machine: we are becoming a world of Morlocks and Eloi. But today's Morlocks have cell phones and Facebook pages.
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* Texting is more properly known as "SMS" or "short messaging service" language. As Wikipedia notes, "SMS language or Textese (also known as txtese, chatspeak, txt, txtspk, txtk, txto, texting language, or txt talk) is a term for the abbreviations and slang most commonly used due to the necessary brevity of mobile phone text messaging, in particular the widespread SMS (short message standard) communication protocol. SMS language is also common on the Internet, including in e-mail and instant messaging. It can be likened to a rebus, which uses pictures and single letters or numbers to represent whole words (e.g. "i <3 u" which uses the pictogram of a heart for love, and the letter u replaces you).
For words which have no common abbreviation, users most commonly remove the vowels from a word, and the reader is required to interpret a string of consonants by re-adding the vowels (e.g. dictionary becomes dctnry and keyboard becomes kybrd). The reader must interpret the abbreviated words depending on the context in which it is used, as there are many examples of words or phrases which use the same abbreviations (e.g., lol could mean laugh out loud or lots of love, and cryn could mean crayon or cryin(g)). So if someone says ttyl, lol they probably mean talk to you later, lots of love not talk to you later, laugh out loud, and if someone says omg, lol they probably mean oh my god, laugh out loud not oh my god, lots of love. Context is key when interpreting textese, and it is precisely this shortfall which critics cite as a reason not to use it (although the English language in general, like most other languages, has many words that have different meanings in different contexts). SMS language does not always obey or follow standard grammar, and additionally the words used are not usually found in standard dictionaries or recognized by language academies.
The advent of predictive text input and smartphones featuring full QWERTY keyboards may contribute to a reduction in the use of SMS language, although this has not yet been noted.
The objective of SMS language is to use the least number of characters needed to convey a comprehensible message, also as many telecommunication companies have an SMS character limit, another benefit of SMS language is to reduce the character count of a message, hence, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization are largely ignored.
The dialect has a few hieroglyphs (codes comprehensible to initiates) and a range of face symbols. According to a study, though it is faster to write it takes more time to read than normal English. According to research done by Dr. Nanagh Kemp of University of Tasmania, the evolution of ‘textese’ is inherently coupled to a strong grasp of grammar and phonetics."
For a witty but caustic comment on texting and English, read John Humphrey's article, I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language.
