Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Dear Internet…

Dear Internet,

You have a full keyboard in front of you. You, on average, have a total of four fingers and two thumbs to use said keyboard. It stands to reason that you would be more than capable of fully spelling out words such as “you” and “second” (as in removed at the last second").

What exactly makes you think it’s acceptable to use short hand like “ur” for “your” in public discourse? Not only does it make you seem dumb, it weakens your argument. Ur can be a German prefix meaning proto or primitive or it can mean a city in ancient Sumer, but it does not mean you’re or your. Just because you text that way to your friends doesn’t mean you should expose the rest of us to your typographical atrocities.

Language may be constantly evolving, but that is no reason to backslide into a series of ambiguous hieroglyphs just because you can’t be bothered to type a couple extra characters. Your keyboard has all those letters (and characters) for a reason. You’re a big boy now, you can handle it.