What's In Plain Sight

If you look at the spelling and grammar skills of today, you might think we’re all getting stupider. It takes determination to outwit a trend as big as texting and a social network as popular as Twitter. But they’re destroying our spelling skills—at least the skills we’ve all been taught. Is it something to LOL about, fight, or do we take the “when in Rome” approach?

As wonderful and convenient as technology is, we can’t deny that it makes us lazy. We don’t bother to remember phone numbers because even a base-model cell phone will store hundreds of them. We don’t have to remember how to get somewhere because that nifty GPS will talk us through it. We don’t even have to remember when to be lazy because our DVRs store our couch-potato time for us.

So with all of this convenience, spelling errors are starting to litter blogs and Facebook updates. Errors are now becoming the new rule. RLY. Text abbreviations are showing up in e-mails written with access to a full keyboard and without a character limit. R U kidding?

You have to decide for yourself. If you’re a purist—if you think no sentence should ever end in a preposition because we take our rules from the Latin, and you don’t use abbreviations, even when you’re texting—you’re going to fight this trend with all you’ve got.

But if you embrace the dynamic nature of language—if you’re totally fine with made-up words like ginormous, and you recognize that olde is an old way to spell—maybe you see the lazy text-speak revolution as the logical next step for the English language.

Won’t it be GR8?