My Battle in the Name of the English Language

Before you ask - No.

No this will not be a blog post about the "mongrelization of our proud white dialect with Spanish and ebonics."

Whatever the grand fuck that means.

I have no problemo with that kinda stuff. Without shared words between languages we wouldn't have things such as deja vu, or je ne sais quoi, or... shit do any not come from the French? We need to work on that. Wait, there's a German one: schadenfreude (loving it when someone gets their shit kicked in by fate). So you can see that the English language isn't threatened by the use of foreign words or other turns of phrase (in fact, some people think we need more of them.

What is a threat, though, is this massive, frightening, almost unholy movement towards netspeak. I am sure that there is a real word for it, but I don't want to look it up. I prefer to pretend it is some terrible disease that no one took time to name because the sheer eye-hemorage-inducing terror of it all left them too dumbfounded to speak, and when it slipped away no one wanted to remember it.

You know what I am talking about... it's the kind of idiot-bred wackiness that turns "Thank you for all your help" into "kthnxbi!"

When I first became aware of this silent predator of intelligence I was but a wee lad of maybe 11 or 12. I was IMing with a friend when she said "lol."

Keep in mind that this was during simpler time when the internet was new and still cute and adorable. Before it hit slash-fic producing puberty and unleashed a whole realm of evil on the world.

When she told me it meant "laugh out loud" I could see the reasoning behind it. We were still new at this whole "Mass instant communication through text" thing. How else were we supposed to say we found a comment to be funny?

MaleScreenName1 - And then the priest said to the rabbi, I asked for a lobster!
FemaleScreenName1 - I find your comment to produce a reaction akin to amusement.

So ok, I can accept lol. Of course soon enough I was just typing "haha" because I just can't even try to be trendy, but the point still stands.

Then it started to get out of control. Rofl. Roflmao. Roflmfao. Pretty soon I began to think statements I was making were so hilarious people couldn't even be bothered to type, they simply had to mash the keyboard to let me know they hadn't had an anuerism from laughing so hard.

"brb" made sense to me too. You're talking to someone, suddenly the house catches on fire and a robot is trying to eat your dog. You're not going to take the time to type out, "Hold on a second, man, some gnarly shit's going down here." Even "Be right back" is too much. Shortening it to "brb" allows you to politely excuse yourself without pissing off your parents, girlfriend, dog-eating-robot, etc.

Now, though, something more sinister is happening. No more are breevs (internet abreviations, get it, I think I heard that somewhere) simple used for quick interjections. No... whole sentences are disappearing at a rate even more alarming than the loss of the rainforests.

I am so glad I am not a word.

For instance, say I want to write something simple, like "Oh my God, I find your comments entirely too hilarious!" (though why would anyone ever say that in real life?) I can just write "OMG, I ttly lold! Rofl!"

First of all, why do you need to tell me you're rollingonthefloorlaughing when you just told me you laughedoutloud. Secondly, is it really so hard to just type out the damn words?
Thirdly, do you have any idea how stupid you sound? And really, if it hadn't been for those Cingular commercials with that girl who talked like some people type then maybe this could have just been a silent threat. But no! Instead those commercials held up a grim mirror to the possibilities of our bleak, bleak futures.

Don't you realize? Can't you see? You are that annoying as fuck little girl! I know we all like to laugh at those commercials ("Idk, my bff Jill? haha... what a lamebat.") but if you actually text those types of things to friends, then you. Are. Her.

And really, I blame it on Twitter.

140 characters? Are you fucking kidding me?

Most times I Twitter something I have to either pray I am not having a thought so simple that my two year old nephew couldn't fail to articulate it, or I have to self edit myself so that it becomes clear to me after a minute that I shouldn't have bothered trying into the first place.

But then again, I suppose there is nothing to stop the slow, cancerous forward march of the breevs. Man got tired of pushing things, he invented the wheel. He got tired of lifting he invented pulleys. He got tired of women he invented homosexuality (bah-dum-kish). Now he gets tired of writing, and he invents breevs.

God help us all.