[CENTER]
**
WORLDS UNDER THREAT**
[LEFT]
Words everywhere are in serious danger of being butchered by poor linguists the word over. (Spelling error intentional.) This is actually a real concern of mine. The quality of language in today’s society is extremely poor. Just yesterday I heard a television presenter say “The two people that is goin’ be responsible for these kids’ behaviour are Sandra and David.” Now call me a nit picker but ‘is’ and ‘are’ should be switched around in that sentence. And shouldn’t there be a ‘to’ in there as well?
As a big fan of language, and it’s intricasies, I hate to see it misused in any form, but by far the worst offender of language abuse is the text message. How I despise their abbreviations and mis-spellings. Because of the popularity of texting, the ability of the populace to speak and write correctly is suffering. “Wat u at?”, “C U l8r!!!” and “Hav u bn 2 c the nu Harry Potter?” are phrases now in common use. These bastardisations of perfectly good words have led to a new rule being introduced in British exam papers. Students are now allowed several mistakes in grammar and spelling where real words are replaced with their text equivalents. This is preposterous and is only making the problem worse.
The internet is also a major component of the threat to grammar. Posing as a communicative aid, it leads the unwary surfer into a bewildering world of abbreviations and corruptions such as ‘LOL’, ‘LMAO’, STFU’, and the infamous ‘teh’, now used deliberately in the so called ‘Elite’ online language, itself an indecipherable gobbledygook of numbers and letters, designed to be easily understood only by the internet gaming elite.
Correct spelling is not encouraged; errors and mistakes are merely ignored. The disease is spreading. Even large and reputable companies have dire spelling and grammar mistakes on their websites. Schools are in fact amongst the most dangerous and prolific culprits of carelessness with language. My own place of work regularly includes ridiculous blunders in notices for reading by staff and customers.
So what is to be done about this travesty? Words are dying all around us. They are joining their recently deceased friends, the punctuation marks. We cannot simply ban media which includes spelling errors, but we can all make an effort to improve our own ability to communicate. With a continued effort, we too can change the word.
[/LEFT]
[/CENTER]
