Internet Literacy

[Johnny Ringo]

Bugs the crap out of me, and frankly it makes the person typing it out to sound like a complete idiot.

Which sounds smarter?

What music do you listen to?

what music do u listen 2?

 

[Apocalypse Tank]

Lately something has been getting on my nerves; illiteracy on forums and the internet in general (although this doesn't seem to be a huge problem on the Escapist). I'm not talking about poor vocabulary or the occasional misspelled word, I'm talking about the inability to write a complete sentence, or even an understandable thought. Is it really so hard to type "you" instead of "u" and put a punctuation mark at the end of whatever you're trying to say? It doesn't take even a second to type the extra two letters that make up words like "you" and "know", but people skip them anyway. I'm sure these people have at least a third-grade education, and if they don't I'm not sure why they're attempting to make an intelligent argument of any kind. Does anyone have an explanation for this? Any input would be appreciated.

Welcome to the internet of NAO
You win 2 free Internets for this discovery

 

[milskidasith]

And once again, I repeat my argument to the "saves time" people (well, roughly repeated, anyway.):

If you really, and I mean really, don't have the time to type a few more more letters into a sentence (in this case, typing out the full word "you" as oppossed to the word "u") then you either have something that requires your urgent attention going on (urgent as in every millisecond counts, not urgent as in "my TV dinner is done") or are disrespecting me. Why? Because by shortening the word "you" you are actually saying that saving one tenth of a second of your life is more important than my ability to read your post without having to weep for the English language. This is even worse when you type in such a way it is also time consuming to decipher your message, because you are then saying that saving a small fraction of a second of your time is worth not only your ability to come off as a person who cares about having a nice discussion, but also is worth more than the numerous seconds it would take me to decipher your illegible shorthand.

 

[Canadianwookie]

Internet Illiteracy? Falling grades?

I blame marijuana.

 

[DeleteMe1112311]

Bugs the crap out of me, and frankly it makes the person typing it out to sound like a complete idiot.

Which sounds smarter?

What music do you listen to?

what music do u listen 2?

I think you mean "wat music do u lisin 2". (No offense intended but I would like to show how far short hand has degraded.)

We should just adopt Newspeak and have done with it.

All you ungood oldspeakers are hopelessly clinging to the past.

I like to think I'm clinging more to the last strands of intelligence left in the world, you may be intelligent but its hard to express that through a cloud of misspellings and shorthand slang.

Furthermore, certain letters are needed in words to dictate meaning and annunciation. I pray to god people who type in shorthand don't have kids but if they do how are the kids going to know how to even type or know what they are saying? We need letters to find root meaning.

But once again this all falls back to the same old argument. Oldways VS. Newage (excuse the new phrase for lack of a better description). Oldway people make a good point, and the newage group retorts with flawed, misinformed arguments. The oldways group then makes another counterpoint which the newage kids then ignore so that they can post references to what I can only describe as "nerd humor" and flame the other side, ignoring the fact that all their arguments are misinformed. Neither side ever gives in to the other side, no matter how good one side destroys the other.

Mind you this process isn't always true, but its either that that or vice versa, one side is almost always clearly wrong and would, in any debate or face-to-face argument lose. But now with the invention of the internet and the total lack of moderation that it brings the world falls into indecisive squabbles...no one ever admits fault or even tries to listen to someone, no conversations, just arguments.

It makes me worry what life will become for the next generation. I can't honestly say I have any hope for the human race as a whole anymore.

But I digress. Short-hand text is useful in certain situations, it is true. I once used penny texting and sent over 500 text messages a day. I could cut off over 2000 characters and save myself $20 a day. The problem is how wide the short-hand is becoming. Its used for everything, even when totally unnecessary. And it is being applied to more and more words. I can live with shortened words like "2" or "u". Its where its going, with entire phrases being formed into acronyms and every other word being shortened, retexted, or otherwise changed that annoys me. It makes things overly complicated and only serves to lengthen the generational (or intellectual) gap. Over time, new slang will be made and this current slang will be frowned upon the same way using complete english is now. Anyone defending it now will defend it then and it will become another generational divide.

(Please excuse how horribly worded several parts of this probably are.)

 

[whitelye]

We should just adopt Newspeak and have done with it.

All you ungood oldspeakers are hopelessly clinging to the past.

Welcome to the Brotherhood.

Down with Big Brother!

 

[Aries_Split]

People who EVER use "lol" should be killed.

I consider myself to be literate both in reading and writing.
I know, very impressive.

lo-*Dies*

I know how to read; and since I'm really advanced...*looks around, whispers* write.

 

[Imitation Saccharin]

Another reason being... so you can pronounce the word correctly!

I don't want to get into a big thing, but that's silly.

Exhibit A: Depot.
Exhibit B: Phillip

 

[OuroborosChoked]

Another reason being... so you can pronounce the word correctly!

I don't want to get into a big thing, but that's silly.

Exhibit A: Depot.
Exhibit B: Phillip

[Phil] - Knowing that 'ph' makes a 'f' sound -> 'fill'.
[lip] - Lip.

What's difficult about that? You've heard of phonics, yes?

Depot, being a loan word from French, would be pronounced the French way. See etymology argument.

Where exactly was that supposed to trip up my assertion? This doesn't really apply to Phillip, as it's just a name, but if you spelled 'depot' incorrectly, you probably wouldn't be able to find out what the word meant, since you wouldn't know where it came from. It would be a junk word. Literary litter... literally!

 

[Imitation Saccharin]

Where exactly was that supposed to trip up my assertion?

Because it's a pointlessly esoteric system of layered pronunciation and incompletely translated words with more half-rules then a Republican convention propped up by linguistically egocentric people.
The fact that it has such a hilariously convoluted system of spelling from 3 major languages that doesn't even apply consistently simply emphasis how ridiculous the arguement is.

If I said depo, would that really change anything? If I said fillip, would you really be confused? Besides not looking "right", why can't I do these things?

but if you spelled 'depot' incorrectly, you probably wouldn't be able to find out what the word meant

You can't find out now except by looking it up BECAUSE IT IS NOT PRONOUNCED FOLLOWING ENGLISH RULES!
Its got its own special rule you need to look up or know, otherwise you'll spell it wrong.

 

[XzarTheMad]

It's a mix of a modern, fast society, a youth growing up on instant gratification and people to remove their obstacles and general laziness. I prefer to have as good grammar and spelling as possible, but it's my second language so people will have to excuse me. It's a matter of making an effort, I think. If you care what you write and you want to make yourself understandable you will at least try to be coherent. If not it shows, with txt-speech, lack of punctuation and grammar, and so on. People who forget or omit capital letters, such as in names or whatever really annoy me. But then again.. complaining about it won't help. All we can do is set a good example and hope people catch on.

 

[smallharmlesskitten]

you do raeisle taht all the ltertes in wrods can be mxeid up and siltl be rceoingsed.

the only thing that has to stay the same is the one at the front and the one at the back

 

[XzarTheMad]

you do raeisle taht all the ltertes in wrods can be mxeid up and siltl be rceoingsed.

the only thing that has to stay the same is the one at the front and the one at the back

Old news, and it doesn't make it any less annoying to read. Yes, it's decipherable, as is TXT-talk or l33t, but it's annoying. The point with good grammar and spelling is that it makes it a pleasant and enjoyable thing to read your thoughts. I may just be a prude, but I generally disregard people's posts if I must focus more on diciphering it than considdering their opinions.

 

[Amnestic]

All you ungood oldspeakers are hopelessly clinging to the past.

All of us ungood oldpeople clinging to living, the human race needs to move ahead and all kill ourselves in one mass suicide that runs planetwide.

;D

you do raeisle taht all the ltertes in wrods can be mxeid up and siltl be rceoingsed.

the only thing that has to stay the same is the one at the front and the one at the back

Old news, and it doesn't make it any less annoying to read. Yes, it's decipherable, as is TXT-talk or l33t, but it's annoying. The point with good grammar and spelling is that it makes it a pleasant and enjoyable thing to read your thoughts. I may just be a prude, but I generally disregard people's posts if I must focus more on diciphering it than considdering their opinions.

New guy (Welcome by the way)echoes what would have been my post if I were a tad faster (*shakes fist*) perfectly. I'm tired of seeing the "as long as letters at the front and back are the same, it's fine" argument. It's really quite foolish in regards to internet (il)literacy. We're talking about slaughtering words and cutting them in half, not about mixing them up. The fact you pointed out helps if someone makes a typo or two, but it's not really relevant to the topic at hand.

And on that point, I hate people who shorten both "Why?" and "Yes/yeah/other affirmative" to just a "y" without adding punctuation.

Me: <something of meagre importance, but still desiring input and/or thoughtful response>.
Them: Y
Me: ...what, why or yes?

And suddenly them saving one tenth of a second has cost them exponentially more time as they have to explain or affirm their meaning. If they'd just used full language in the first place, I could have either explained myself or continued with my point.

 

[Downside]

The only reason people shorten words on the internet is these people are so used to typing texts in a same way to reserve space, as texts have character limits so by doing so they don?t waste valuable credit. This was before mobile contracts became dirt cheap. So when they come online they just use the same jargon.

A lot of my mate?s type using this horrible slang on facebook when leaving messages and it saddens me as they just come across as complete idiots (partly because they are). When its in a text i can deal with it, but when its online it seems unnecessary.

Casual spelling mistakes on the other hand i'm fine with as i make them all the time.

 

[XzarTheMad]

Well, the point is if you scan a piece of text you can't actually read it any less easily, than if it is correct.

I don't mind abbreviations, i actually don't mind words like 'lol'. Part of the brilliance of English is the way it adapts, in a few years a word like 'lawl' or 'lol' could be in the dictionary. Hard to define, yes. But arguing that it's not right or correct in English really is something of a moot point since English constantly modifies itself.

I definately agree with you, but isn't the point with text on, say, forum boards like this to actually read the posts, not just scan them? For casual chat, for instance, not capitalizing and punctuating can be forgiven, as you say, we just scan it. But for more in-depth texts you need some proper grammar to be taken seriously. No, if you don't want to make deep comments and just brush over the subject you don't need to be a so-called "grammar nazi", but I don't think that's what this thread is about. It's easy for people to be offended and easy for others to take it to the extreme, but I don't think OP intended for this to be a thread about perfect grammar. As long as you can make yourself understandable you're good, right? Being foreign myself I don't always use perfect grammar and spelling, because I don't know it well enough to. Similarily, some may just type fast and not bother to read it over, or struggle with dyslexia or something similar, and that's cool. As I wrote earlier, as long as you make an effort it's cool. And that's probably OP's problem, that people don't.

 

[Xaryn Mar]

One of the greatest problems I see with shorthand etc. on internet forums is that these self same forums are read by people for whom English is the second or even third language. Now if the words are correctly spelled these people will likely recognise them and understand them but if they are in shorthand (which uses the pronounciation of the word) it can be very difficult to understand said word. Especially if those people have difficulties in pronouncing English because their language stems from another group than the Anglo-Saxon (with a smack of French and Scandinavian)