As long as there are people alive who still speak it, a language is a living thing. It will evolve.

Trust me, I used to be very uncomfortable with that, myself. My teeth would hurt when someone uttered "sewed" rather than "sewn," or "it's her," rather than, "it's she."

But the older I get, the more I realize, it's not your fucking grammar or your spelling that matters; it's what you say/write, and your intentions when saying/writing it.

u guiz its jst da internet dnt tayk it so srsly omg

I wouldn't exactly call the use of singular letters in place of words "evolution". At least, no good kind. And what does it matter what your intentions are when writing something if it's so jumbled that no one can understand the bloody message you're trying to convey?

Edit-



This kind of thing exactly.
God, that burns my eyes!

When I want to understand what someone's saying If I feel the need to understand a person, that I don't, I take the time to learn his/her dialect/language/jargon...

And yes, you make a valid point: when someone has a message, and they want that message understood, it falls to them to express that message in a manner that will be understood. But that makes it their problem, not mine. The only time I would take on their problem is if they were frustrated, and I wanted to help them out. Then I might help them frame their message/argument/rant/request...so that I could help them meet their needs. (Or if there was information they were sharing that I needed.) But otherwise, I move on. I read on.

I feel exactly the same way. When I was a teenager, I was always correcting the grammar of my friends and family, but I started to realize eventually that the "wrong" way my parents say certain things is really a kind of dialect. Many things that used to make me grit my teeth have become so commonplace now that I'm fairly sure they will become the accepted use at some point.

That being said, there's a time/place/reason for abbreviations and chatspeak, and, in my opinion, most circumstances just don't apply. If the folks over at MATY want to set a standard for their forum, that's totally ok. I prefer things written out as well. What's not cool is the kind of meanness that I've been hearing about. I mean, people who carelessly butcher language are annoying, but people who carelessly butcher others' feelings are just plain despicable.

Frankly, I don't think there's much of an excuse anymore. Most phones have auto-correct or word prediction which makes it way more convenient to use proper grammar. (And really, how much time do you save by not pressing the e in text?) I mean, I could probably understand it if your house were on fire and needed to flee, but then you probably wouldn't be posting on a forum, you'd just run.

Or it's understandable if you were someone who has one finger on each hand.

Well, despite contrary opinions, I wholeheartedly believe that spelling and grammar do matter.
While reading some of these replies, I've been sitting here trying to imagine a world where the beauty of the written word has "evolved" to the point where sentences like the one BloodiedHell typed out above are commonplace. That our language could have deteriorated to the point where that appalling mixture of chatspeak and misspellings has eventually become our only language, and that in the future text in games, books and so on, would all look like that if the attitude toward not caring about grammar, spelling, sentence structure and the like, continued. No one should need to learn a whole new jargon just to decipher someone's almost illiterate writing because they're simply too lazy to bother with the inclusion of one or two extra letters in each word.
It's an ugly thought, but clearly, I'm just old fashioned.

I've already given my opinion on the way some folks at MATY deal with it.

LOL if it's any consolation, I'm pretty sure I lost a few valuable brain cells from just writing that.

wow that forum is full of stuck up people that act like 10 year olds

And I lost a few reading it..

I generality think it is a lot younger, but I will take your word for it...

OK then, first, I think it's really bad form to discuss another forum publicly. That disqualifier aside... ... As someone who has hung around that site for an extended period of time, I think that site exhibits the worse example of In-Group/Out-Group psychology that I've ever seen on the Internet. But maybe I just haven't really been around the Internet much.

The worst of the nasty commenters actually think that acting nasty will get them accepted by the "in-group", when the reality is that educated, smart, and funny people, particularly those who are able to deliver a somewhat scathing reply in a humorous way, are the ones who actually get accepted into that group. That's not to say that some of the "in crowd" don't also get nasty from time to time, but all those people who think that pointing and laughing at the newbies will get them invited into the inner circle are terribly misguided. As for Pescado, he is a brilliant modder of the sims and I can't tell you how many of his TS2 mods I found essential for my game. But he also seems to want to be a puppet master. Not just a puppet master of sims, but also of the other people who sim.

But I do have to say that as long as I hung around there I don't remember being poked at much. First of all because I mostly just read up on info about the game and it's an excellent source of technical info, and I could usually answer my own questions by searching them out. I tried to contribute info when I could, but I never tried to coddle the lazy posters who couldn't be bothered to help themselves (that will get you ripped a new one for sure). If I did get poked once or twice, I pretty much ignored it, mostly because I couldn't care less about what was being said or the person saying it. And as long as you don't give them ammunition, any confrontation there will usually fizzle out.

I also agree with Pary about the language issue. Language and the ability to communicate is important, and if you don't think so, then I'd advise you to not post there. Because the best way to get sporked at MATY is to show up, refuse to read any of the preceding pages of the thread because 'you don't have time', ask an incomplete question without explaining what you've already done to try to resolve or answer the issue, or ask the same dumb questions that umpteen other people before you have already asked and expect someone to answer it anyway (even though some research on your part would find an answer), and to do it all in chat speak.

Well, the funny thing is, there is no grammar Gestapo overseeing this site, yet it generally remains a place of reasonably well written, thoughtful, and insightful posts. Generally. OK, sometimes.

As far as I'm concerned, they are words. They're just not standard English.

Eh. Growing up, I had tons of teachers with the same mindset and it drove me up the wall. Don't know how much time I spent explaining that yes, Mrs. Pruitt, AAVE is a linguistically recognized dialect of English and no Mrs. Pruitt, my intelligence is not determined by the fact that I say words differently than you'd like, and, I promise you Mrs. Pruitt there is a difference between standard and proper English.

Childhood griping aside, as long as you can understand what someone is saying, it's the freaking internet. Pretty sure you've already addressed this but this has always gotten my goat.

This, x1000. I teach English, and my students are primarily adults who speak English as a second (or third, or fourth, or fifth...) language; some of my students who are considered native speakers actually grew up speaking an "alternate" language like Spanglish (codeswitching) or AAVE. Their language is constantly devalued in place of so-called standard English, which is typically only representative of a small group of people. Anyway, this is just a personal rant related to what is currently going on in my classroom.

It's annoying to me that people will nitpick grammar in the name of "protecting" the English language (completely ignoring that English itself is a franken-language). It's a way of not engaging with content. I'm with you--as long as I can easily understand someone, I don't really care if they use "ur" or the wrong their/there/they're.

I agree there. And I agree you don't have to be nasty about it.

I seldom if ever use chat-speak when texting. I spell everything out. Of course, it helps that I have one of those little sliding keyboards on my cellphone!

I also teach a lot of non-native English speakers, many of whom have come to the US for school as young adults. Though, perhaps it is worth noting that most of my students (including the roughly 50% who are non-native speakers) come from moderately privileged backgrounds. My subject is not English, but I do spend a lot of time pushing them to write in clear and correct written English, especially correcting their assignments. I care much more about form and style in written English than I do in spoken English, and I think that's reasonable. When people speak, I'm fine as long as I can make out the main ideas. But for a written assignment? I care a great deal about proper grammar and sentence structure (not to mention spelling--there is a certain type of pain in seeing "researches" used as a plural noun for the 40th time).

On something like an internet forum, my standards are in the middle. It should still be better than spoken English, because when you write you have the opportunity to reread and correct yourself. However, neither this nor most other internet forums constitutes what I would consider a formal setting. Unless you're in a discussion about modding, precision isn't THAT important. IMO, setting really matters. My students are writing formal papers, and they're trying to communicate precise ideas. When their grammar and sentence structure is lacking, it (1) takes me up to 5 times longer to read/grade their assignments, and (2) makes it hard for me to know exactly what they're trying to communicate (because small distinctions really matter for the work I'm grading). I can't afford to spend more than 15 hours marking one assignment, and I can't give credit for things that aren't reasonably clear. I regularly find myself wishing that my students' previous English teachers had enforced higher standards, because the class I'm teaching isn't English and yet (because it is primarily evaluated through written work) bad writing skills are holding a lot of students back.

Writing clearly and well is an important skill, and people only gain skills through practice (since unlike the Sims we don't have alchemy, brain enhancement, or cheats). However, I don't think that belittling people (the MATY approach) is effective pedagogy; cruelty is never an aid to teaching. In terms of spoken language, I'm going to be pragmatic and say that speaking well (in an upper-class educated kind of way) is also a useful skill, though I don't think that people should have to speak that way all the time (code-switching is normal and most people do it to one extent or another). Whether or not it's fair, people are judged on how they speak and on how they write, and there are plenty of other battles on which I put a higher priority (e.g. every dumb idea that comes out of Arizona, for starters)...

I understand where you're coming from, Arithmancer. It would be disingenuous of me to tell my students "You don't need to learn standard English." It's the cash language--they will have an easier time advancing academically and professionally if they learn to follow standard language conventions. The problem is, those conventions vary from community to community (for instance, passive voice is frowned upon in my field, but it's acceptable in others). Furthermore, people occasionally use standard English as a means to decide whether or not someone is acceptable within a community (I won't go too far into this, but Linda Christensen's article "Teaching Standard English: Whose Standard?" discusses this perspective a bit).

The other issue is that I have low-income, first generation students coming from mostly public schools; these schools focus on teaching towards standardized tests that foster nothing in terms of writing ability. My students cannot analyze, research, or synthesize because of such tests. For many of them, the only writing feedback they have received is grammatical, which is also a huge problem--what is a grammatically perfect paper worth if it is thoughtless and fails to communicate any meaningful information? I think there needs to be a golden mean between grammar and content, and I try to value both equally rather than focusing solely on surface concerns.

In defense of those English teachers who may have not enforced high enough standards: more and more research is pointing to the idea that grammar drills are not effective. Rather, many scholars believe that students understand grammatical rules better if they learn it in regards to their own writing. This is why I comment extensively on every draft my students submit; that way I can give each student individual attention and explain grammatical rules on a student-by-student basis, and I can make sure they are achieving larger goals as well (audience awareness, organization, etc.).

Anyway, I completely got us off topic, and I apologize. I just to wanted to respond to your thoughtful reply. You make some excellent points about setting: language usually changes based on setting, which is something I try to teach my students so they can learn to adapt their language to reach their audience. I just happen to think most online forums should be accepting of casual language. I can actually talk about this all day (I'm really interested in standard language ideology and public discourse), but I don't want to bore everyone and I feel like I'm completely derailing this thread. (again, sorry!)

It isn't their attitude to spelling and grammar that troubles me, per se; it's their 'berate and humiliate' pack mentality towards anyone who asks a seemingly innocent question, or well worded or not.
Their problem is arrogance not lofty ideals regarding the use of language. I saw someone torn to pieces there simply because they had a Sims avatar (the sort used on the Sims 3 official forums). Their question was ignored and their choice of avatar was mercilessly ridiculed. I was appalled by this trespass onto the fringes of what amounted to cyber-bullying - and as a parent this hurts my heart. That person being torn to pieces *could* have been my own child, and for what? An avatar? It was the online equivalent of not having the right trainers or the latest phone. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Most of this is written in the forum rules, isn't it? So I am a bit surprised when people are surprised by MATY behaviour. It's like reading the sign at the tiger cage to not feed it and then be shocked when it bites off their arm. And even if one didn't read the rules, it takes 1 hour reading the posts to understand what is and is not possible.
Honestly, three pages of posts here about something that isn't really worth discussing. It's how they are, it's how they want it to be, so leave it at that. If one wants to glomp they should go to a glomping forum.

English people is so snobbish sometimes, me silly outlandish person gets some minor things wrong and they get so grumpy, I'm not English! Where I live there is a difference between oral and written norwegian, you do not write dialect stupid!!

This thread

I was going to make a grammar Nazi joke in reply to this but then Google images turned up three grammar Nazi related MLP pictures and now I'm put off.

When texting first came out, didn't they charge by the letter? I think that, and the cycling the alphabet through a numeric keypad, led to the silly "u"s & "plz". BUT...that's been quite a while ago and these people need to get back to communicating with actual words. I can skim through a well written post because my brain recognizes the words but those abbreviated posts (you guys, it's just the internet....) force me to either pass them by or spend 10x the amount of time trying to decipher them.

MATY is ridiculous but I find there are times when I need to post. Sometimes I get decency but not often. There are a handful of ogres that do nothing but waste time posting insults and hatred.....nothing useful...AT ALL....which makes me laugh because I've just made them waste time. Can't imagine having so small of a life that I can spend hours on a forum reading posts I have no intention of assisting with but will happily go round and round calling names, bullying, trying to convince others (and myself) that I'm not a tiny speck of dog crap a filthy lime tick picked up. Initially I felt really awful after reading the "responses" but, over the years, I now come away feeling a bit better with who I am.

I learned at an early age what a Tiger looked like and what a Tiger did. On the Internet, there is no visual clue as to the nature of the beast. And, just because you've been told that they value what they consider good grammar or the appropriate amount of Google'ing, it does not prepare you for the venom and foulness that comes at you for minor infractions. Because I can't actually SEE the Tiger, I assume it can't be much different from what I know/experience regarding people. Perhaps I don't approach as cautiously as I should but I do have a modicum of awareness that I might look stupid and try my best to behave. I do try to read the posts but when a thread is 14 pages long and MOST of the responses are the hazing and nastiness that is MATY and I cannot stomach reading one more after the twenty-eighth useless bash, I sacrifice myself on the off chance that SOMEONE will give me a solution. Still, it is a surprise that those sad useless humans can be so thoughtless and cruel and I'm glad I am still surprised by it. I would hate myself if I ever thought that behavior was okay, even with a preface that "oh well, that's just MATY".