I hate the internet

Here’s a challenge for you, don’t ponder it too long. What do the following words have in common?

there, their, they’re, its, it’s, your, you’re, then, than, whose, whom, capitol, capital

If you answered they’re all homonyms, you’re wrong, because only some of them are. The correct answer is they will be dead in American English by 2030, thanks in no small part to the Internet.

Sure, you could blame the public school system for this. It’s not hard–especially when most teachers themselves don’t know the proper use of the semicolon and choose to mark any use of it as incorrect.

But that’s just an extraneous factor. The real culprit is the internet.

The internet, while giving people access to more information than was ever available at any other time in human history, also makes them lazy.

As early as seven years ago, we heard reports of students submitting papers written entirely in lower case letters and using internet acronyms. At the time the response from the internet community may have been a LOLROTFLMFAO, but things are certainly a bit different now.

Internet English is becoming a greater problem, and seems to deteriorate more with every passing year. I recall three years ago receiving Der Langrisser scripts from an educated, bilingual college graduate, who was unable to differentiate between “then” and “than.”

When people spend their days reading poor writing, they begin to emulate poor writing. Laziness and inattention becomes the newly accepted norm. Cases are quite possibly the worst product of people too lazy to reach for the SHIFT key.

Cases in English serve to alert us to proper names and proper nouns. It’s the difference between “The Chinese Consulate,” an organization, and “the Chinese consulate,” an office with a couple Chinese people in it.

Not only this, but capitalization plays a role in how we read. It serves as an indicator where sentences begin, and helps out eyes to recognize the shapes of words by the height of alternating letters. It’s well known amongst typography experts that serif fonts, like Times, work better for large passages of text since they have more distinguishable letter forms.

The average reader can rip through a properly written page set in a serif font faster than he or she could a poorly written passage in a sans-serif font. Which is used predominantly on the internet? Oh yes, sans-serif fonts.

Earlier this year, McDonald’s launched its new advertisement campaign: “i’m lovin’ it” No period, no capitol letters present, and the shortening of “loving” in print. Fifteen years ago, this may have been considered “ghetto English,” but today, it’s becoming the English of the new generation.

Only three weeks ago, my entire Classical Mythology class was given an extra point on the test because no one present understood the word “whose.” They thought it meant “who,” thus changing the context of the question and causing the English incompetent English majors to get it incorrect.

And therein lays the problem–when you have people entering university study writing and speaking like this, the language is doomed. These are the people who will be educating children in another few years–and educating them incorrectly.

Already the semicolon and colon are lost. “Whose” and “whom” are uttering their last painful cries. “i” has apparently been deemphasized and demoted to a lower-case pronoun by scores of students. E-mail has sent proper cases out the window.

o wel I ges teh en iz jut dewmed lol so ne way i g2g so l8r.