Bryan W. Alaspa 1Speaking in very short sentences
November 13th 2009 14:40
I love social media. I mean, here I am blogging away and blogging is part of social media. I am also on Facebook and Twitter and I even have a MySpace account, but I never check that one anymore. I love Facebook. I enjoy Twitter. I am a voyeur and I admit that I love peeking in on people’s lives and Facebook and places like that are like opening the door to your room and telling the world to come on in and snoop through your photos and videos.
The one problem I have with social media is that it is slowly eroding our ability to communicate in things like, oh, I don’t know, full sentences! Before there was social media there were the chat rooms and if you were the kind of person who was a stickler for grammar there was no place to make you want to gouge out your eyes like chat rooms. It is amazing to me how few people actually know proper grammar.
Let me start out by saying that, although I make my living as a writer, but I am not a grammar specialist. Where I fail, consistently, is with punctuation. I never know when to use things like dashes and colons and semi-colons. I like to use commas but I know I use them wrong and sometimes my tenses get mixed up. In short, I am always going to need a very good editor, but that’s OK, all writers do. Look at the Bible, apparently men once decided even God needed a good editor, but I digress.
Still, I hate when people use the wrong version of “their,” “there,” and “they’re.” Most people seem to have forgotten the word “they’re” even exists. For those of you who are staring at that word baffled and confused it is what is known as a contraction. It is actually two words that have been mashed together. In this case the words are “they” and “are.” So, when you want to convey where two of your friends have gone somewhere you would say, “they’re over there” because you would be contracting the words “they” and “are.” What you tend to see these days are sentences like “there over there.” Huh?
The other word that appears to be an endangered species is the words “too.” Most people don’t even try. You are supposed to use the word with the double Os when you are conveying also. In other words, “My friends went over there and I decided to go too.” Or something like, “My neighbors across the street got a new lawn ornament and then the guy down the street had to go and get one too.” If you are going some place, however, you want the single-O version. “I went to the store,” is a good example.
These days, hardly anyone even acknowledges the existence of the word “too.” I feel bad for it. It is just a simple word that requires an extra turn of the wrist to handwrite that extra O. It takes even less effort to type it out on the keyboard.
Twitter may be the coolest thing around but its limit of 140 characters could be the biggest detriment to the English language ever seen. People are going to be lopping off letters and things like that like crazy in order to fit their sentence into the space. I find myself doing it all the time. So, don’t be surprised if we are all speaking entirely in code before too long. Its jst a mttr o tme.
The one problem I have with social media is that it is slowly eroding our ability to communicate in things like, oh, I don’t know, full sentences! Before there was social media there were the chat rooms and if you were the kind of person who was a stickler for grammar there was no place to make you want to gouge out your eyes like chat rooms. It is amazing to me how few people actually know proper grammar.
Let me start out by saying that, although I make my living as a writer, but I am not a grammar specialist. Where I fail, consistently, is with punctuation. I never know when to use things like dashes and colons and semi-colons. I like to use commas but I know I use them wrong and sometimes my tenses get mixed up. In short, I am always going to need a very good editor, but that’s OK, all writers do. Look at the Bible, apparently men once decided even God needed a good editor, but I digress.
Still, I hate when people use the wrong version of “their,” “there,” and “they’re.” Most people seem to have forgotten the word “they’re” even exists. For those of you who are staring at that word baffled and confused it is what is known as a contraction. It is actually two words that have been mashed together. In this case the words are “they” and “are.” So, when you want to convey where two of your friends have gone somewhere you would say, “they’re over there” because you would be contracting the words “they” and “are.” What you tend to see these days are sentences like “there over there.” Huh?
The other word that appears to be an endangered species is the words “too.” Most people don’t even try. You are supposed to use the word with the double Os when you are conveying also. In other words, “My friends went over there and I decided to go too.” Or something like, “My neighbors across the street got a new lawn ornament and then the guy down the street had to go and get one too.” If you are going some place, however, you want the single-O version. “I went to the store,” is a good example.
These days, hardly anyone even acknowledges the existence of the word “too.” I feel bad for it. It is just a simple word that requires an extra turn of the wrist to handwrite that extra O. It takes even less effort to type it out on the keyboard.
Twitter may be the coolest thing around but its limit of 140 characters could be the biggest detriment to the English language ever seen. People are going to be lopping off letters and things like that like crazy in order to fit their sentence into the space. I find myself doing it all the time. So, don’t be surprised if we are all speaking entirely in code before too long. Its jst a mttr o tme.
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