What the hell is happening with the English language? This is, by no means, an original rant as I’ve read several like it before, but I decided to chime in. There have been several other pieces and books written by many authors who have loathed the diretion in which English is headed. To start, I am not perfect and neither is my writing, usage and grammar. But it’s still a far cry from the “lolz we talk lyk dis on da iNt3rnetz” talk that people genuinely use! Sure, I’ll joke around and end a word with the letter “z” every so often in the company of friends and those who know it’s all in good fun. Plural words begin to end with a “z” and even words that aren’t plural (ex. im gonna headz to da coffee shopz. meet u there! lolz).

What’s worse is the failure to make the possessive and contraction distinction. I really hate it when people say “your” when they mean “you’re.” We all learned that in 2nd grade, so what’s so hard about it? Same goes for the its/it’s confusion; the former is possessive and the latter is a contraction and short for “it is.”

I’ll admit that as of late, I’ve been getting lazy myself. I always abhorred “LOL” but find myself using it every so often. I also had a strong distaste for “BRB” and “GTG” or “G2G.” I don’t use the last two so much, but it’s become normal in IM and SMS talk that it’s going to end up poisoning the language. Maybe I’m being extreme, but it’s not hard to see where this could be going.

Speaking of acronyms and laziness, one that bothers me a lot is the mixture of two or three word cities, towns and neighborhoods: WeHo (pronounced wee-hoe) for West Hollywood, SoMa for South of Market, NoHo for North Hollywood, SoHo for South of Houston (how-stun) and so on. Is it that fucking hard to say the name of the city as it was named? If your name was John Hopkins, would you appreciate it if I called you JoHo?

Let’s clean up the laziness in our work and even our daily banter. Why not make an effort to spell things out, learn correct and proper usage (I’m guilty of this, too) and write without making glaring and painful mistakes every now and then?