[fitgal2]

Originally Posted by Less of Lena

I just hope good grammar doesn't go extinct in the process!

Umm I think it already has...High school kids are starting to use MSN slang in their papers

[almostheaven]

Originally Posted by GreatBigMonsterMomma

I fear that it already has. Grammar and its twin sister, proper spelling, are on their last legs.

My daughter never could spell worth a lick. It was the subject she had the most difficulty with. We tried Hooked on Phonics, tutors, the whole works.

So when she had dinner with me yesterday and used the last of the pickles, I asked her to write it on my grocery list. After she left, I rewrote it and crossed out PICKELS.

[JuliaTN]

I also wonder what they're going to do with all the "leet speak" words that really don't have any verbal counterparts.

I must be terminally unhip, I have no idea what that means.

I am constantly correcting my husband's grammar (we have an agreement that I can do that if I leave his spelling alone).

I'm allowed, nay, encouraged, to correct my fella's grammar. If he says something that he knows isn't quite right he waits for me to tell him how to say it before going on.

I, for one, find the addition of words to the English language very interesting. I've been learning Spanish and it seems so cumbersome at times. Most concepts or "things" that have come about in the last hundred years either use a Latinized (did I just make that up? ) version of the English word or a description of what the thing is (e.g. telefono for telephone, absorbente interno for tampon).

[Less of Lena]

Regarding "leet speak"...

Originally Posted by JuliaTN

I must be terminally unhip, I have no idea what that means.

I'm referring to the shorthand many folks (mostly teens, I think) use online. Some examples: "wre r u" instead of "where are you", or "ne1 no how 2 ski?" as opposed to "Does anyone know how to ski?".

I'm also referring to substituting numbers for letters, as in gr8 ("great").

There are also all the online acronyms... lol, rofl, asl, and so on.

I think the keyboarding language is probably evolving even faster than the spoken language is!

[Less of Lena]

I wouldn't mind so much if people knew proper grammar and spelling and made a deliberate decision to break the rules, for whatever reason. What worries me is the nagging feeling that fewer and fewer people know what rules they are breaking.

Paragraphs? Punctuation? Capitalization? Spelling? There are rules about those things?

Many of the posts I see on message boards these days worry me as much for their presentation as for their content!

I really feel sorry for folks who are trying to learn English, especially those who frequent message boards ((waves to Pavellina))! English is complicated enough as it is without adding in all the slang variations!

[almostheaven]

My husband has a really good grasp on grammar, but he's terrible with spelling. He can't get the long/short vowel sounds figured out. Our running joke is "huge...with a D!" When we first met online, he used to type hudge all the time. He still has a problem taking the extra T out of "writting".

Some people think leaving out punctuation in posting is ok. But if I find a post too difficult to understand with too many run-on sentences, I'll tell the poster. Some posts give me a headache to try and read and I'll give up on them. And if I'm giving up, others probably are as well. So they're not going to get the responses they might have hoped for.

[GreatBigMonsterMomma]

I upset my husband last week because I refused to read one of his blog posts. It was long enough I'd need to scroll down, but there weren't any paragraphs, or so much as a space between sentences, to say nothing of the spelling. It may well have been profound, but I just could not do it. He is coming up on getting out of the Navy this summer so he is looking for a civilian job and unfortunately discovering that being unable to spell 'submarine' is not a good thing for a submariner! This is to put it mildly.

When I was in school, not really that long ago, my English teachers commonly deducted points for misspellings. Not all do, sadly. My cousins went to the same high school my husband did, and not a one of them can spell either.