Yes, I freely admit to being one of the Twitterati. OK, I only have a meagre handful of followers and I suspect that most of those are bots and spammers, but hey, that's OK. It assuages my need to feel like I have acolytes and that's frankly all that matters. What I have noticed on the scary times I dare to ride on the public timeline however is just how fast and how far the English language is dissolving in the sea of brief tweets. I'm well aware that, like text messages, tweeting is a very limited format in which you have to cram the entire contents of your head into no more than 140 characters (though in many people's cases that isn't a problem without using contractions or abbreviations), so I accept that in order to get the sense of something across in that space you sometimes have to use 'u' instead of 'you', and '4' instead of 'for'. But, like text messaging, the habit soon spreads until you see tiny short sentences that are almost illegible to a non-textspeak speaker, for example; "its nice wen u can make tym 4 ya frenz exspecially after hs". I mean, WTF? (See me getting into the spirit there?) It is a sentence that is ostensibly in English, but actually needs decoding before it can be understood! I am well aware that language is a fluid thing and that changes happen in it, but dammit, we'd just got to the point where English was codified and finally all sorted out, and now a bunch of kids and / or retards are out there reducing fine words into letter dysentry, to be shat out in a fetid stream onto any medium you care to imagine; forum posts, Myspace, Facebook, even emails, none of which particularly have limited space, and so no excuse to be compressing the language in this way.
Another bug of mine that is on the same wavelength and thus relevant to this blog is the vast and hateful overuse of 'lol' - it isn't a fucking punctuation mark, dimwits! I am so sick of seeing sentences that end in 'lol' - "Hey man, I heard your cat died lol", "My face just had to be amputated because I dipped it in a superglue vat lol" - did you REALLY laugh out loud? Really? Did you? REALLY? I sincerely fucking doubt it. Not unless there are a hell of a lot of schizophrenics out there with inappropriate affect who piss themselves laughing every time their fingers touch a keyboard or phone. Exclamation marks do just as good a job of passing on amusement at a statement and cost two fewer characters than 'lol'. Also, they make you look like less of a fuckwit brain donor. This also all extends to the similar overuse of 'roflmao' which seems to get used in the same sentence frighteningly often; "My aunt got run over lol it was by a jeep roflmao".
On a serious note, and rantiness aside, they say that literacy standards in the UK are dropping dramatically, and I can't help but wonder if this is one reason. If everyone wrote proper English, people who want to communicate on the net or via text would have to learn to spell and punctuate properly, but they don't; their friends and peers all communicate in this lowest-common-denominator fashion whereby words are rducd 2 thr smlst bts tl u cnt ndstnd ne ov it. Fucking pathetic.
In commemoration of the English language and the idiots who can't use it despite being English speakers, I am creating the Idiot's Dictionary. Feel free to drop your suggestions on Twitter at #idiotdictionary and I will publish the best ones here every month. To get you started, here's some I prepared earlier:
Ostracised - about the same size as an ostrich
Qualification - the process of turning ordinary chocolate into Quality Street
Procrastination - what you do before having a wank
Anemone - what tramps say to passers-by
Fibia - habitual liar
Nanotechnology - technology invented for grandmas
Genealogy - the study of genies
Neurologist - tense person given to bouts of drama
Agoraphobia - fear of fighting
Enunciation - liberating nuns
Paediatrician - special doctor who treats paedophiles
Chlorophyll - special pill that knocks you out
Disembark - to pull the skin off a tree
Faction - action film based on a true story
Depilation - having ones' pillows stolen
Compiling - jumping on a prone person in a playground and shouting "ALL PILE ON!"
Have fun, and spell your words properly lol
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