When I was looking up a question on the internet using my default search engine, one of the results came from Yahoo Answers. Typically, I skip over those links because the answers are mostly the opinion of the responder, however, since I was looking for an answer to my question and the traditional routes of online research were running into frustrating dead ends, I decided to click the link and, hopefully, find a seed of truth.
As I started reading the responses, my thinking shifted from my original question to “Why… can’t… this… person… SPELL… and… use… correct… GRAMMAR??? AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!” Is it me or is it just a sign of the times? When I was in school (elementary, middle, and high), my teachers were sticklers about using correct spelling and grammar. When I was college, my professors were all about using correct spelling and grammar and context and “the logical flow of a written paper”. So I’m curious to know how posts can appear on what is supposed to be one of “man’s great technological achievements” (aka “the internet”) and you have to interpret what the writer is saying. For example, in the one post that I read (which was enough for me), this is what had to be interpreted:
“cuse” = “because”
“diffrent” = “different”
“were” = “wear” (based on the context)
“wanna” = “want to”
“to” = “too” (based on the context)
Additionally, there were only commas. No periods or other punctuation marks to indicate the beginning and ending of sentences (and I use the word “sentences” very, very loosely).
I’m not an English major, I will never claim to be an English expert, and I’m sure that if my previous (or future) blogs were ever analyzed by an English professor, mistakes could easily be pointed out, BUT if we can’t make the difference between “I want to wear that shirt because it is different” and “i wanna were that shrt cuse its diffrent” then we’ve got a real problem.
Sadly, the post I read was written five years ago. Yeah. Think about that for a minute.
Yahoo Answers has a neat feature on every user post that says “Report Abuse”. Does this count as abuse? English abuse???
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