About those grammar rants

There is a depressingly large number of people on the internet who cannot distinguish words like “there,” “they’re,” and “their.” People can complain and rant, but the reality is that it won’t change a thing. Not online, anyway. I found a particular rant that was undoubtedly the angriest, most explosive grammar rant I have ever come across. I admit, the author’s style is unorthodox and questionable, but it was such an energetic and fulminating rant that I could not resist. I would have provided a link but I don't think the server likes it when I do that. It marked me as a spam blog. Either that or whatever I'm writing is absolute rubbish. Great. Anyway, the language doesn’t bother me, but some people may find it excessive.

The rant was undoubtedly focused on the language behind texting and general internet usage. The author hones in on the inability to differentiate their possessives, contractions, commas, and similarly pronounced words that mean entirely different things. The culprits are typing and texting as if they are conversing with their audience, and as a result, use similarly pronounced words interchangeably. There was similar case involving Facebook when a “friend” was attempting to correct a person’s use of the word “your” in the phrase, “your beautiful,” but the original commenter could not understand her mistake and mistook the correction as a compliment.

People are also just lazy. As the author points out, there are only two more letters in words like “why” or “are,” and yet people are too lazy to fully spell them out. People say bad grammar is everywhere, but it just may have achieved global saturation; because it exists primarily on the internet, it has become very difficult for people to blame a particular geographic region or social class. It is literally everywhere. Today the internet, tomorrow the world!

It is difficult to assume or guess the author’s motivation for exploding into this diatribe, but I think the author is particularly lamenting the fact that many people simply do not care about correct spelling and word usage. I’m pretty sure that the author isn’t directing such rage at a particular group whether it may be race or social class. It comes across as an angry, curse-the-world type laments. The author is also unlikely to be among the “intellectual elite,” but is probably just an average person who learned and retained their knowledge of basic grammar.

Granted, this type of writing is primarily found on the internet (I hope), but it certainly does not inspire confidence in our high school and upcoming college students. Leetspeak can be funny and amusing to read when used in internet memes, but it loses its charm, if you can even call it that, very quickly.

I’m pretty certain bad grammar was always present. It’s just more obvious today due to instant communication and modern multimedia. And just because bad grammar is more prevalent, it does not necessarily imply socioeconomic decay. Although, George Orwell did mention that if a civilization grows decadent, its language inevitably follows. Maybe that’s the real problem.