Hay their. Whts up nm here. I rly wntd to tel you abt txting. isnt it a kool thing? lol.
I am disgusted. No, really, that ‘sentence’ up there (and I’m saying that with innumerable apologies to Shakespeare and Zimmerman) took all of my strength to type and not bash my own head in with the keyboard. What in the name of Keats is wrong with you people?! Look at that. Look again. That first sentence of this particular entry isn’t just my attempt to be sarcastically charming, that’s really what some texts look like. Look… Okay, I know, I know, I’m being unrelatable again, but I have good reason. Let’s look at this slowly, shall we? You know, stop and smell the roses. Only, the roses are nails in the coffin of the English language and I’m not so much stopping to smell them as I am shouting like an exorcist trying to banish the evil spirits from your minds and cells. Up to speed? Excellent.
Texting is a ridiculously easy way to communicate, I get this. It takes all the anxiety of actual contact with a human being almost entirely out of the equation. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my many years of writing, you can tell a lot about a person by what they’re willing to let get out there. Anyone can write anything, but what they let other people know they’ve written is an entirely different affair. Stephanie Meyer is willing to let her, admittedly, bizarre soft-core ‘romance’ fantasies be published by the truckload and that truck comes back, only coated in gold and carrying more money than we owe to China. That’s worked out great for her, but Salinger would be rolling in his freshly-dug grave if he’d known. Did he know? I certainly hope not. Back on topic – what you let out into the ether is a reflection of yourself. And the majority of texts I’ve seen show this horrible, mutated creature that enjoys shortening words and hates vowels.
That’s another thing entirely, vowels. What exactly is the problem with vowels? A, E, I, O, U, and their pal Sometimes-Y are great fellows. They always kill the younger crowd when they pop up on Sesame Street, anyways. But somewhere from those Muppet-filled days to the ones when we’re gripping a phone, something changes. People, the letter E didn’t kill your father. If a guy in an E costume did, don’t blame the letter, blame the man. Do you see how nice this article looks? That’s because all the letters are there. I didn’t just choose to ignore one of the keys, though I honestly came incredibly close to letting Q go. The letter Q killed my father.
As much as that annoys me to point of borderline homicidal rage… deep breath… that’s not the biggest concern here. What is? U tell me.
Notice anything wrong with that last little bit? You better have. If not, please report to The Red Talon immediately and turn in your human license, because you aren’t what we need in society. Yes, you.
This horrid habit of substituting and abbreviating where it really isn’t necessary is bleeding into other things. Before this column went to print, I was told of a number of official papers – literary analyses – that contained the number two (‘2’, because one guy is going to read the word ‘two’ and wonder what it is) in place of ‘to’ or ‘too.’ Then there’s ‘there.’ Did you there’s three words pronounced [th air] ? There are! ‘Their’ (as in their own), ‘there’ (as in a location), and ‘they’re’ (as in they are)! See, learning can be fun. Ugh…
When you begin writing the letters u and r for the words you and are, there’s a problem. But when you do it and don’t even realize, then there’s a sign of the apocalypse. The end of the world won’t come in meteors or zombies, but ignorance. Boom, put some quotations around that and a little dash with my name and you’ve got a sweet quote (FYI, quotations look like this “”). Really, people, and it’s not just schoolwork, no it’s stuff that really matters. Resumes, e-mails and letters… poetry! Poetry, people! U R not Prince!
Why not look at text as a medium for art? Countless authors have treated the written word as an art form over the years, why can’t you? I don’t expect you to crawl down from the slimy buttress of lol’ing and u onto the city streets of human language immediately, no, but I think you could at least give it a go. Here, next time you even think of texting someone or, heavens forbid, updating your Facebook status with non-words, stop. Just pause, think for a minute. Breathe deep and consider the ramifications here. Do you want to look like an idiot? You’re about to if you hit enter. No, I’m not kidding – stop. Just look at it, change the u’s and r’s out for actual words, make those brb’s and roflmao’s actual statements. Use descriptors, dare I say, adjectives. Make that Tweet a beautiful thing to behold, a simplistic piece of word-art. There you go. Good job.
Wait…
Is that… is that a lol?
*sigh*