Y Cant Kids Speel

I am a spelling snob.

No, not like those uber-annoying people who feel the need to correct every misspelled word in every forum post or chatroom... I only do that once in a while to virtual-elbowjab my friends. They're good sports about it. As I've said before, chat/instant messaging/etc is conversation on the fly and since I can't type fast for squat, I'm not about to get all hypocritical... in my chatworld, "and" becomes "nad" and "then" is "hten" more often than not. I usually blame my long fingernails or my malfunctioning shift key, but honestly? I just never learned to touch-type. (Aside: in chat last night, my typonese read "milk nad juice" and I nearly fell off the chair. Sometimes they're worth expanding upon, and other times I reeeeally don't wanna go there.)

I don't blog with perfect grammar either. Who talks like a college textbook? Pfft. I overuse ellipses, use extra punctuation, slang, and sometimes deliberate typos (cue LOLspeak... im in ur blog, steelin ur fotos!) because that's my casual language. I don't use spellcheck, though, and never will. It's wrong too often anyway.

However... last night, I crossed over to the dark side. My friend's teenage daughter wrote out a grocery list. I saw it lying on the table and on a whim, *gasp* I corrected it, like a teacher would with homework. I had to think a moment to figure out what rovola was (ravioli) but the rest were simple words that a 17-year-old should know. No, she's not disabled in any way, unless you count that growth that looks suspiciously like a cellphone sprouting from her hand. Therein lies the problem. She's grown up on textspeak. She wouldn't know an acronym from an anthill but if I sent her a text that read "Pk up C & brg 2 Ls lso grn shrt n shoz" she'd know to grab her little sister's green shirt and sneakers, pick sis up and take her to her friend's house after school. I may not have had that quite right, but you get the idea.

I read stuff on Facebook, craigslist, various forums and websites, and I'm always guaranteed at least one recoil moment when a college kid misuses an apostrophe or misspells a word ("I love there nacho's") and reading on, I discover he's a molecular biology major and I go WHUH? HOW?! And those moments, even without biology majors, are far too common.

There is a website that pokes fun at stupid craigslist ads. The site creator as well as the comment contributors will pick listings apart ruthlessly, tear down the author with any and all verbal ammo they can come up with... but they always notice and give props for proper spelling and grammar. It's *that* rare to see. Seriously. (Okay, so it IS craigslist, not high school composition class, so I shouldn't be using that as an example. Comp class is far more advanced. But this does happen all over teh innernetz, and it drives me batty.)

People of the Forums: Whatever point you are trying to make, whatever debate you are hotly arguing for or against, whatever cause you are championing is going to be written off (pun intended) if you can't properly execute simple language and writing skills. If you're just chitchatting, you get a pass on most things (see first paragraph). If you're trying to throw around five-dollar words in a Very Serious Post but can't spell five-letter words, I'm just going to skip over you and move on.

Without learning the basics, you might be the next person to do this:

You want fries with that?