The Internet Makes You Dumber
25 Sep
While getting on my Twitter account a few minutes ago to think of some clever phrase of 140 characters or less that would adequately describe my day, I noticed one of the most popular topics. It wasn’t just one of the most popular topics, it was the most popular topic at the time.
SERIOUSLY? I don’t claim to know really anything about proper grammar and sentence structure, but I was pretty sure that America knew the difference between “your” and “you’re.” I guess I gave the general public more credit than they deserve.
The inability for people to recognize the difference between those words leads me to believe that we soon may be mixing up other words as well. This could have DISASTROUS effects across the board. Take the word “he’ll” for example. If the general public stopped using the apostrophe in this basic contraction, people might think you are just walking around telling people they are going to Hell. Awkwaaaaaaaaaard.
Or how about the word “won’t?” Devolving that word turns it into the past participle of a word that means “to be in the habit of doing something.” Now you have the exact opposite connotation that you were going for. Instead of saying that you will not do it, you are now talking about how you would like to be in the habit of doing it.
Texting and the Internet have caused people to forget how to spell and how to form words. Let me put it in a different way. The Wikipedia article for SMS language is longer than the article for Transcendentalism. It has 150+ words/phrases and their abbreviations. It kind of reminds me of Swift making fun of Sprat’s notion of “naked speech.”
They have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can; and preferring the language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants before that of wits or scholars. —Thomas Sprat, from The History of the Royal Society (1667), Part Two, Section xx, Their Manner of Discourse
Basically he’s talking about how people need to quit using a paragraph to describe something that can be described in one sentence. (I wish I had a cite for what’s next, but I don’t.) So Jonathan Swift comes along and says, “Really? If we go with that logic, eventually people will just be walking around carrying sacks of stuff to point at when they want to talk.” We may not be devolving that low, but I think that his point is definitely valid. Look at how people talk now?
I MEAN SERIOUSLY. YOUR AN IDIOT.

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