Slashdot Mirror
"L33T" Speak Invades Schools
Masem writes "NYTimes reports on how common chat room/IM shortcuts (such as 'u' for you, 'r' for are, etc) are creeping into the classroom and homework assignments from those teenage kids that spend a significant amount of time in chat programs. This is giving the teachers headaches in trying to grade the assignments, much less understand them because of the techno-generation gap, and to try to prevent further abuse of the language, have begun penalizing students for using the net slang. Students sometimes don't even realize they use the chat room shorthand until it's pointed out to them, because that method of chatting has become second nature to them."
If they can't differentiate between being online and writing on paper for school on which they'll be graded on, what hope is there left for the world?
...but that doesn't make it proper English. Save the 'l33t speek for cyberspace, learn how to speak the language properly in the classroom.
It will help you in aspects of life that have nothing to do with computers (yes, they do exist!)
I was wondering why my spell checker was having such a hard time with the absence of punctuation and plethora of acronyms.
When will they come out with M$ w3Rd 31337 ?
"Kinky sex involves the use of duck feathers. Perverted sex involves the whole duck." - Lewis Grizzard
This is horrible. Absolutely horrible. And I am serious. May the AOLites rot in hell.
We are offering free computer classes from 5:30PM to 7:30PM!! (no prior experience required).
If what you teach is Msft Windoze, may God have mercy on your soul!
teachers... have begun penalizing students for using the net slang
Good! More power to them! School assignments should be written in grammatically correct English, using proper spelling. This requirement might be lifted for certain creative writing assignments, but in general, this is what schools should be doing.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Is it really that bad?
i mean, would'nt it be a good idea to teach the other generations how the tech generation speak?
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
This is, at best, a cop out. When I was younger, I ran home everyday and got on BBS's. I used kewl, l8r, btw, etc, day in, day out. If these kids can't figure it out or they 'forget' (don't spell checkers catch this stuff?), too bad for them. I feel for the teachers who have to grade 100 papers and mark down for spelling cool with a k, but I would stand behind any teacher who did so.
--trb
I work for a hedge fund, and I regularly get emails from a Managing Director that say things like "r u sure we should do that". No punctuation, no caps.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
D33r MrZ. butts3x0r
U g0tz a k1d d4t 41n7 d01n h1z w3rK r1t3, b1zn0tch! h3 k33p t4lk1n L1k3 h3 41n7 g0tZ n0 c3ntz! WTF? U = p3n1s 1n U aZZ!
sux0rz 2BU! h0p3 y3r br4t g3tz h1z NUTZ ch0ppa 0ff!
-Mr. Demarcus
History Department
My HS AP English teacher must have been way ahead of the curve. She instituted an automatic -10% penalty for "egregious" use of the english language. And there was no cap at 0% - as she put it, "yes, you can do so badly on a essay that I will take points off of your previous essays." One poor kid in the grade below me lost 40% in a single sentence (there's just something about using 'a' as a verb) - omg is was the funniest thing I ever saw.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
r u sure this is a problem? IMHO, TPTB should not be upset by it. TTFN
Since these kids are so used to using ''chat-room'' lingo, perhaps we should return their papers in this chatroom lingo.
''yo yo, ur paper is lame, u r banned from teh klazzrizewm.''
''y r u b'n 2 dumb 2 day? redo ur paper.''
That, or a big stick(tm).
To repeatedly bash them in the fucking head until
they realize how utterly retarded they are.
I am so sick of this crap.
English motherfucker do you speak it ?
from using smilies in class :)
quite irritating habbit
"The majority is always sane, Louis." -- Nessus
http://slashdot.jp
You should see some of the business correspondence that I receive daily :-(
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
They should sue...
After all English is a living language...
No not even I can defend this.
Just have the kids steal a report off the web with proper English and let it be.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
My blood boils every time I hear some 15 year old AOL luser say "Oh yeah, I've been on AOL for three years now. I know all about the internewt."
URGE TO KILL RISING
N0 w4y!!! PPL $hud b3 4bl3 2 r173 4$ w3ll 4s 3v3r! I n0 I n3vr us3 1337 sp33k wh3n I'm r1t1ng!
-Pray, proceed that most enchanting narrative! This cellar possess an utmost fascinating echo. Indeed suited for Poe, don't you think?
-Huh?
A friend of mine, Rayner, who works at a University in England has also received a job application from an undergraduate that contained 'L33T' speak (well, Mobile Phone abbreviations). Think about it, this person had already GOT TO UNIVERSITY!
Needless to say he told them to rewrite it (after getting a copy).
I just don't understand - admittedly I am a good typist, (I can easily manage 60 WPM with a 99% accuracy), but even for an average typist, it is not intuitive to type U instead of you, or R instead of are.
Maybe it's because I learned to type on a typewriter, not a computer, but I don't really see why this ever became popular.
The only time I use it, is for heavy sarcasm - I.E.:
Wow! U R A 733t hax0r
when somebody posts a 2 line patch to kernel-dev that fixes something that nobody cared about anyway.
However, it should be scolded in the context of simply not being acceptable for assignments. Some computer typing shortcuts are useful and can be used to help kids (e.g. writing notes compactly).
-- Scientist: You aren't going to leave me here, are you? Boagh! Thump...
How can they have problems grading the paper?
./. lol!"
... dang!
"I sez 2 him, ur 1337. he sez ty & kept reading
Seems like it would be really easy for me to give that a zero. My fakie 1337 speak isn't even obscure enough to pass a 1337 speak test let alone an english test
Schools? Hell, my coworker uses such slang. He's a foreigner who must have learned chatroom-speak at the same time that he learned English, and must think it's acceptable in a proffessional workplace. Or maybe his teachers in college didn't beat him enough for using chatroom-speak on his homework.
mod parent up!!!! the computer classes at Mt. Cavalry Baptist Church are second to none. Their pastor taught us all about you filthy gnu-hippies and your hell-bound open sores.
Hot gritz for you all.
I'm currently in my senior year of engineering school. As one of our requirements, we must take a course in Technical Communication, which is basicly the art of writing memos and proposals. I wasn't really looking forward to the class, but I was ok with an easy class before graduation. Well... The technical communications instructor writes in chat speak. Her communication skills are ok, but I would expect her to teach by example, yet every one of her e-mails to the class has used u->you, r->are, etc. This is a college instructor in technical communication, and she can't even remember when to use proper grammar!!
chalkboard:
...
LOL is not a word
LOL is not a word
LOL is not a word
LOL is not a word
LOL is not a word
LOL is not a word
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
If there was ever a reason for corporal punishment in schools, 1337 speak would be it.
Could someone please post the article here on Slashdot? I keep trying to read it on the NY Times website, but my eyes are continually drawn towards "Eve Brecker". And she's WHAT??? Only 15!?!??! Oh lord.....
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
"L33t" speak in all forms is lame, obnoxious, and childish unless used for sarcastic mocking of those who use it. I don't discuss things in depth with anyone who uses it as a primary pattern of writing, and usually consider those that use it to be unintelligent and foolish.
The Internet is the greatest form of human communication ever developed, to cheapen it by using poor language out of a willful choice is just sad.
If anyone talks like that to me offline, I will call them a fucking idiot. To their face.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
I live with a teacher and he complains about this all the time - as if kids and their usual bad spelling wasn't enough to contend with.
There was an article in the British TES (Times Educational Supplement) about this recently, and about how one student wrote a whole GCSE exam script in L33T/text message language: "Delete text message style, say examiners"
- Welcome the coming of the New World Odour
A few months after I got my palm pilot w/ Graffitti on it I actually had to write some notes on *gasp!* paper... I went back to my desk to review them and was shocked to find I had written them all Graffitti style and not in my actual hand writing... I no longer use my palm pilot (mainly cause the batteries died and I'm lazy)...
Teachers may have orthography rules and can try to teach "proper" writings, but as more and more people write 'u' for 'you' this rules have to be audjusted cause proper language is common language.
Or does someone still spell it 'thou'?
What is proper English? The English have a different idea then the Americans who talk funny according to Canadians. The language changes... that is why it is modern.
I am going to hell and I am going to take all of you with me.
You know, the ones who play FPSes and are constantly yelling at each other! If they're going to stay 1337, they need to keep talking differently than others. One day, I'm going to log onto a quake server and see this:
EliteFellow: Ah-ha! My aiming skills are unmatched. I have such prowess it is as though I own you.
TricksterMan: Not so! Network latency has inhibited my natural reflexes!
EliteFellow: You deserved your comeuppance, you have been jealously guarding the Quadruple Damage for some time now without moving elsewhere!
I think that would scare me more than leetspeak, really.
-Denor
in highschool last year our english teachers swore by the (often updated) MLA handbook (modern language association). maybe it's time they updated the MLA handbook & dictionaries. if they can add "doh" they can add "ur", "u" and "r". i don't personally use those abbreviated words, but hey, languages change, despite what the french government and english teachers would like to think. mexican spanish uses alot of simplified words from european spanish, as i understand it. this is just a natural evolution of language. you don't spell shoes "shooese" still, do you (citing a translation thing from my american history text book)? that's just stupid and a waste of your time/effort.
i don't think students should be penalized for being "cultured" seperately from the teachers. a better solution might be to introduce "classic" english, and a more vernacular (secular?) english that is more commonplace.
moox. for a new generation.
The isn't anything wrong with "l33t speak" in and of itself. It is good for the language and it is essentially just slang and abbriviations
However... It has no place in homework. If you use it in your homework assignment, you should get an F. Schoolwork isn't always just about the assignment in question, it also is about the quality of work. Using "l33t speak" in homework just shows that you are unwilling to make an effort to do a good job. You deserve an F or alteast the homework should be returned as Incomplete.
Same thing with Ebonics!
Use slang when with friends or in an appropriate venue, but not for homework or the business world. Here on slashdot I see nothing wrong with virii, boxen, or l33t hax0rs. I would have a different opinon if i saw that in my local newspaper.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
Phrases like "IMHO" predate these youngsters by decades, but I can't recall ever becoming so confused as to use them in a formal essay. And despite using Unix "talk" for years, I never ended a term paper with "oo" (over and out). Sheesh.
It cracks me up to think there are people who believe that just because something is birthed of the internet it is devine. Be it music piracy, netslang, software piracy. I remember when I was an IRC junky I had to re-learn how to spell when it came back to the real world. Not to sound like an old geezer but people need to speak plain english, or whatever language you may speak. For those quick to point out my mispellings kiss my a** i'm a recovering undernetoholic.
A few low grades will certainly help them remember the difference between chatrooms and book reports!
I hate to sound like I'm trying to protect the "King's English", but chatroom slang became such in an effort to be able to convey ideas through typing at the rate of talking, and it should be kept to chatrooms. The last thing we need is a generation (gee, I'm sounding old at 26) of kids hitting the Universities thinking "ur" is a valid re-contraction of "you're", and "u" can easily replace "you".
I thought the language was defined by the people who use it? thus we dont all speak 18th century english anymore unless we go to a ren fest.
sorta like a democracy where the people govern themselves through elections.
both of these just dont seem to work out the way they should!
I've picked up a lot of bad habits, particularly leaving the first word/words off sentences, because typing on muds and channels on GEnie (which was mentioned on /. some time back) and the less you type, the more you say, simple economy. Bad grammar though. i.e. "Going to store?" rather than "Are you going to the store?"
However, the language evolves, as we the people use it, hence dialects across demographic rather than physical terrain. Neat, when you consider this is yet another affect of a wired world.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
He says, out loud, "LOL" when he thinks something's funny. Doesn't laugh. Just states, in acronym form, that he's laughing out loud. KILL KILL DEATH DEATH.
The other night we had to go to a parents' meeting at our sons' school.
At the end we were all milling around, and their teacher and I started chatting about the boys. She told me she appreciated how polite they were to each other, to her, and to the other students--among other standard teacher complements.
Soon she complement my wife and me on our parenting skills by saying, "You and Chris are doing a good job as parents. So props to you."
Let's turn the tables: kick off any IM'er who splits an infinitive.
My brother, a High School senior, constantly uses 'leet' in his normal speech.. Not to mention all of his friends.. everything is 1337. Of course, these are the same guys that walk up to each other (i've seen this), and say something like: "D00d! You see that L33t Chix0r over there!?" "Yeah" "Not in a million years will either of us get there..."
This brings to mind the Worth1000 photoshop contest of 'What if Hackers rules the world'. Pretty funny stuff in there. I especially like the ch4mp00 entry..
- This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along, move along..
I guess I'm too old (at 23), but I find that the abbreviations are pointless. When I send IMs, I often send phrases instead of sentances, but I don't abbreviate words. However, I do abbreviate phrases that have been used as such for over a decade. BRB for "be right back" predates IM, but "u" for you is just silly. It's harder to read, and learning to type would make it immaterial.
Additionally, the traditional abbreviations were for "online phrases." When wat the last time you used "away from keyboard - AFK", "be right back - BRB", "laughing out loud" - LOL, "rolling on the floor laughing - ROTFL", etc., in a real life conversation?
These abbreviations are more reasonable for phrases that would only be used in an online conversation. By that logic, "oic" is an acceptable abbreviation for "oh, I see", given that you only use it to convey an online emotion.
I feel like the best thing would be for teachers to penalize, penalize heavy, and encourage students to STOP using online conventions online as well. If people would write in more reasonable English, communication would be easier.
I find people nitpicking over typos, spelling errors, and grammatical errors strange. However, none of us (unless we are slashdot editors *grin*) should STRIVE to butcher the language.
Better command of the standard language improves communication. Has anyone whose ever held a job or been in an adult relationship ever thought "communication skills are over rated?" Most business and interpersonal problems stem from miscommunications, anything that helps that is a Good Thing.
Alex
But if these kids are dumb enough to confuse the two already it may be too much for them to seperate nots and test or
Words once in common parlance are no longer employed, such as thee and thou. Whence, hither, yon, also not generally used.
Language and spelling evolve.
This is not to say that I would expect a teacher to be tolerant of a student using r for are. My teachers wanted me to spell theater, not theatre. I can also do without some kind of Orwellian newspeak, where the words are so over-simplified as to lose any kind of nuance. So, the students are wrong in this time and place. But they might be right in the future.
IANAL(inguist), but I do find the history of English interesting.
Do not touch -Willie
Languages evolve, why can't English branch off into l33t? Its just another social group with its own lexicon. If you will remember Ebonics was the thing for a while. I'm not sure if schools approached this the same way they are approaching l33t, but the situations sound similar. Personally, I subconciously talk in l33t, think in l33t, and other things, but as long as students learn to control themselves when they write and use proper English, no harm should be done by this new dialect
Heh I'm waiting for the post when the same kids get in an arguement and say. kid 1> y0 eye g0nn4 smUrF you! kid 2> j00r smUrF c4n't h4ndle my f1rewall! etc.
This is giving the teachers headaches in trying to grade the assignments, much less understand them because of the techno-generation gap
I disagree. My wife has no trouble marking down anyone who uses "U" instead of You or "R" instead of Are. Teachers face no dilemma here; students do.
If you as a student cannot use proper grammar and spelling, then you are transferred to a remedial course. If you are still unable to use proper grammar and spelling, then further testing is completed in order to determine if you have a "learning disability."
If you're lazy and refuse to use anything but your "chat-speak," then you'll fail English and High School... then no more chat room, because the only jobs open to you won't pay enough for you to afford an Internet connection.
Really? I mean how many aspects of our behavior do we have to change based on the social context. As a college student swearing is rather 2nd hand nature but if I do it to a professor or boss, saying that I do it so much that it isn't my fault won't cut it. I see internet speak everywhere these days and quite frankly it drives me nuts (even online) when people ignore the difference between to,too, and two as well as there, their and they're. I'm not perfect in my grammar and spelling but I think that if something is important enough to say, then it should be compsed as such. I get kind of offended when poeple IM me but don't take the time to spell out complete words and such. Oh well I'll stop being a language troll and get back to the books ;)
I thought for awhile on why someone wouldn't be able to realize they're typing this cyber-shorthand and the only thing I could think of was laziness. I mean, I personally couldn't see how on earth u could b substituting words without noticing it.
But then it hit me. It isn't laziness, but the lack of any real typing skills. Shorthand is simply a result of trying to be more efficient in transmitting your thoughts. Repetition of anything will develop into normal practice. This is evident in the ubiquitous and pervasive slang we have.
For me, I've been essentially a touch-typist since about the 9th grade and it only takes me a few hundredths of a second more to type YOU instead of U. My girlfriend however is a one-handed hunt and peck type. She also uses every short-hand substitute I've ever seen.
Perhaps it should become a requirement to teach kids to touch-type at an earlier age. This would not only facilitate more productive computer use but should also help foster proper language use by obviating the need for this type of shorthand.
sedawkgrep
Is that a salami in my pants or am I just happy to be me?
Is that really "Leet" speak though? This more just IRC/IM talk.
:) can spice up any Essay though.
Good though, they need to cut it off in the roots. I do think a well placed
Bear in mind that many things that were never thought to be acceptable spech have been put into common use and some even make it into the dictionary (cf ain't is in Webster's this way). English, unlike Latin, is a living language and able to absorb from other languages and new styles of speech. Even if that means the use of abbreviations, numerals, and symbols.
LETS DECOMPOSE & ENJOY ASSEMBLING
What has begun penalizing, the headaches?
Point two -- the teaches have begun penalizing for this crap? You mean up until now students were free to turn in this nonsense and get full credit?
</grumpy old man>
TM
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
The funny thing is that in years to come, more and more people will have to "have it pointed out to them" before they notice ... until those become part of the language.
Remember that what is gramatically correct today is not necessarily what was correct years ago. Laguages evolve over time.
The French are so bothered by this that they actively try to fight it.
People can fight the linguistic change if they wish, but in the end, these changes and mutations are Perfectly Normal
The Digital Sorceress
...of the time where I turned in a Chemistry report. As a joke, I typed everything up and changed the font to Wingdings. I did attach the actual report to the wingdings rendered report, but the look on the teacher's face was priceless.
"What kind of chip you got in there, a Dorito?" - Weird Al Yankovic
I'm far from an expert, but real l33t 5p34k involves the substitution of symbols for letters to form words. Often these substituted symbols are higher ASCII values, though there are many dialiects of "l33t". Using "u" for "You" and r for "are" just seems like laziness, and is in no way 31337.
1'm @m @n 31337 H@X0R.
For examples of the differnt dialects possible, see the Lamerizer.
. . . the reactions to this here. I've always seen 'l33t' speak as something akin to "Ebonics" - a form that's quite valid in it's own context, but that doesn't have a place in school in general, and English class in particular. Netspeak is, at best, a dialect. One that takes an exclusively written form, and is normaly reserved to certain compatible media.
/. I've read are supportive of the teachers is an even better sign.
/. as a bastion against the creeping death of the English language. Scary, is it not?
That teachers are taking a stand and slapping kids down for getting lazy (or stupid!) is a good sign. That most of the comments on
Imagine:
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
Every other Germanic based language besides English has gone thru at least one spelling change over the ages - High German has done it, Dutch has done it, all the Scandanavian languages have done it, etc. Not that it was completely painless in every case but most people got used to the new system quickly and in fact started to like not having to remember to write out letters that haven't been pronounced for _hundreds_ of years.
English on the other hand never did this and thus we're stuck with ridiculous spellings like 'night' which might have made sense back back when it was pronounced more like the german 'nacht', but is just plain silly now. And again that was _hundreds_ of years ago.
So if it takes a bunch of snotty-nosed kids armed with technology to come up with spellings which actually make sense, I'm all for it. Don't get me wrong, using numbers for l3tt3rs is just plain dumb, it doesn't save keystrokes and actually makes things _harder_ to read, but abbreviated spellings like 'U', 'u r', 'tho', etc. are a huge improvement over the way things are now (IMHO!)
Once these kids graduate and are living on their own, think of the language gap!
From what I have experienced on online chatting, it seems girls use the shorthand more often then boys do? Has anyone else noticed this? Also the articles seems to chat with girls more on the subject then guys....which seems to support my observations
Yes, Word can be annoying because it enjoys to autocorrect, but if I had problems typing in l33t sp34k I'd just setup a few autocorrect entries like "u = you" and "cuz = because".
7h1s c0mm3nt iz w4ck! D00d3rZ, y c4nt u p0s7 m0r3 0ff3n?
One of my kids from summer camp was IM'ing me and was using these alternate spellings. The problem was the alternate spelling of "come" :
"will u cum to camp next year?"
"please cum"
Some things should be fixed before they go too far.
b4 u crit-eye-size tha use of language n r schools u have 2 realize that language is an art 4m. 4 we live n a free land, and without tha ability 2 express r-selves r freedom is lost. and without freedom of creative language, unconstrained by rules of grammer and spelling which r 2 strict, we 4sake r freedom 2 share r hearts and r minds.
thank u.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
fail to understand, is that what you write, and how you write it, reflects very strongly upon one's self.
For example, in a 'chat room' for Asheron's Call, where people would meet up when the server was not working, there would be many people using this 'leet speak', asking repeatedly for information. By simply using correct capitalization, punctuation, and spelling, I could often get many of the people there to heed my words as if I was a person of authority. Some went so far as to ask how I became employed at Microsoft - I was just a regular user like them, but my choice to use English correctly made them assume that I was someone who knew what they were talking about.
I try to encourage people to use the best spelling and grammar as they can when online. I just cannot 'respect' someone who can't be bothered to type "are" ('r') or "you" ('u') because they want to save themselves from typing two characters.
Try the above sometime. Use your best grammar and spelling and notice how others react to you.
(NOTE: I don't recommend this during intense-gaming situations.. "Help! I am currently in coordinates N7 being att... Uh oh, they have shot me with the... Aw, crap..")
FFFFFFFFFFFFF!
Not only is the statement odd in the first place, it is horrendous English. Why? 'w/' is not a word. It is a very informal shorthand for 'with.' You do not use informal shorthand in academic papers. '@' only means 'at' in bill.gates@microsoft.com. It is indefensible in this context. Whatever the weak case can be made for evolution of a language, etc., you must be able to communicate clearly in any language according to a set of understood rules/grammar/usage. Anything else is just registered dialect. You can write that way in a chatroom, but not in my classroom.
'Discourse in not life. It's time is not yours.' -- Michel Foucault
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
My sister-in-law is starting her second year at Boston University, and I swear getting emails from her is like getting an email from Prince.
:-)"
"Hey! I got a msg 4u. It's gonna be 2-cool 4evr!!!
I can't decide if that's more annoying than my sister and father, who still, in spite of my best efforts to educate them, haven't figured out the basics of the capslock key, new paragraphs, and punctuation in email.
"L33T" - The warez kiddies have spoken.
It is only a matter of time before some student, hyped up with "freedom of speech" or a feeling of "1337|\|3$$" sues the school teacher, the school itself and takes on the school board.
Look for this lawsuit to come out of California, or any other location where students have sued over failing grades and actually having to put their brains through the mental hurdles to actually develop a true thought process.
If Engilsh or [insert Native language here] is being taught, then any use of "1337" speak should result in a failing grade on the paper with a requirement to redo the assignment. A talk with the parents might also be in order, but if bringing home an "F" doesn't clue the Parental Units in, then a conference certainly won't. All Parental Units support their children, and in today's litigious society, calling a parent-teacher conference is really just begging for a lawsuit.
Sig? What's a Sig?
I don't see how "any hot F's want 2 chat?" could be construed as an essay.
you guys need to look at the big picture, any language is forever changing...and with the advent of the internet many things have had to be rethought...and redone...so if this l33t speak is becoming so popular, instead of looking at it as something that is ruining the language why don't you think of it as something reviving and renewing a language for the kids(who may I add are going to be adults someday)
I agree with the idea of not totally revamping our grammar punctuation system, but a few shortened words like "r" and "u" couldn't possibly hurt that much.
Anyways what could it hurt American English is already butchered up enough as is.
-wondergod-
My younger brother has so much problem in its French course (we live in quebec...) because he chats to more.
he doesn't use chat abbreviation in its assignment, but he is so used to it that now, he wrote down things phonetically...
Hillarious sometimes, but very bad nonetheless...
I'd rather be sailing...
English mother f***er, do you speak it?
Guess not
But, really, is this news? As I recall teachers have been decducting points for improper use of english and bad spelling for a while now. I do realize that this does somewhat have to do with the internet, but really it's just another form of slang.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
This may date me a wee bit, but I received my Amateur Radio License back in 1977, when I was 14. I had my novice ticket, so I was limited to CW (Morse Code) over the air. Since CW is a very slow way to communicate, there are many accepted abbreviations and codes. For example: FB OM NO QRM ON UR SIGNAL W9TACO DE WB3IZT Translation : Fine business old man, there is no natural interference on your signal. Your turn, W9TACO (the other person's Ham call), this is WB3IZT (my call).
I would never had dreamed of writing any school work using "code speak" much less expected to get credit for it. "L33T 5P33K" is the same way -- it may be fine on IM or in chatrooms, but it does not belong on school work.
BTW, I know W9TACO is not a valid call sign...if I need to explain it to you, forget it.
Beware of Sleestak
I doubt that 98% of what goes on in chat rooms is even communication, let alone a form of vernacular English.
The only thing that we learn from history is that nobody learns anything from history.
Pick up any gangsta rap album (of any ethnicity), and you'll probably hear something like:
"Let me aks you niggaz sump'n, a'ight?"
That's how languages evolve, deal with it.
Anyone who says "dude", "man", "gonna" or "ain't" is guilty of contributing to the change of english. No one speaks Chaucerian or Shakespearian or even Coleridge-ian anymore! And it's perfectly acceptable in the real world. For better or for worse.
Fuck, look at how badly George W mutilites the language. Ever notice when Newspapers quote him, they always type what he "meant" to say, versus what he actually said? Only liberal papers insert the [sic].
And rap is hardly to blame -- I also blame Cyndi Lauper and her vowel reversal trend that started all this!
(My apologies, as I'm not sure if the n-bomb is offensive or not in this context, i'm just a Benneton(tm) white-boy who thinks he's PC)
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Friends and I would pass notes in grade school. No one was online and and few had computers at home. and we used U and R for in communications. we were just never stupid enough to use them in a paper or homework WE KNEW BETTER! I dont think that its 2nd nature to them should be an excuse. There are many fluent bi-lingual students you dont see them slipping words from there 2nd or 1st language in the middle of a sentance or paragraph do you? I think its just lazyness and seeing what they can get away with...
the worst that I have done is tried to put semi colons at the end of lines on papers i was writing... I caught that though...
I never caught on to the whole internet slang bit - it has a tendency to make people sound like idiots. I understood it's place when AOL was the major internet provider and charged by the hour. But now that local ISPs are becoming a more commonly used solution and the fact that very few, if any, people are charged by the hour...it just makes the whole thing inexcusable. I mean, using "BRB" for Be Right Back is fine when you really have to go to the bathroom but spend the extra five seconds to type it out if you can.
For all the kids who turn in papers with "internet lingo"...they shouldn't have points taken off. The paper should be an automatic F. It'd fix things pretty quick.
I admit to allowing it to happen on more then one occasion. Ok, maybe not U and R but I have slipped acroynms from the net into papers and back when I ran my mud I even used the word laugh to indicate I found something funny.
Perhaps its an indicator that the real world has lost appeal to people. That they cease to find the normal world appealing. Easy to have happen with all this pro corperate anti human crap we see every day in the news. With the United states in the crapper its little wonder that these kids spend hours online hiding behind a viel of semianonymity being who they want to be with only minor fear they might be discovered or worse, tracked into some marketing database.
Ok, Its bad in school, its bad if your technical writer. Im neither, and If I slip a netslang into an email to a coworker my coworker will know what I mean (oh yeah, Im retired, i dont have any).
Correct the kids when they do it. They and I live in different world because you've made yours suck.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
C'mon, this is not a "cyber thing," this is not a "techno-generation gap" (jeezus, who writes like that?), this is just a plain old "dem crazy kids" thing.
Every generation's teenagers (and, it seems, their only slightly older journalists) like to think there is something uniquely outre and wonderful that has inspired their slang. Jazz, beatnik society, ascendent drug culture, Saxon invasion, whatever, every age had its new lingo "come from somewhere." And every new lingo had its detractors in the halls of Academe grumbling in their tweeds about "the crazy way kids communicate these days." And, in the long run, only undergraduate sociologists really care.
As for this being yet another topic that has zero business whatsoever on Slashdot...
PUH-LEEZE, girlfriend! Let's just not go there, 'kay?
I blame Prince (the artist formerly known as the atrist formerly known as Prince) for all of this.
Anyone ever try to read the liner notes for Purple Rain? That song I would die 4 U? It was written like that.
BTW - It was my sister's album. I just liked the guitar and motorcyle...and Appalonia..mmmmmmmmm Appalonia.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
ph33r |\/|y L33t |-|0|\/|3\/\/0rxz 5||11z!!!11!!
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Ebonics! Of course this "1337" speak seems to be a close derivative in it's grammar. #linux on open-projects used to have bots that would kick you for using "idjit" speak. And life was good.
All that needs to happen now is for some wacky clueless liberal tree-hugger to decide that this is an artistic expression of the Techno Youth and should be encouraged. Then there'll be a big push for it to be declared an official language. Which will, in tern, mean that we'll have to tolerate ebonics all over again!
More and more I find that Russia is becoming the new "America"...as in "the land of the free and not so bogged down with being politically correct all the time."
First up, what the article is describing is not 133t sp34|<. Its just dumb abbreviations used over IM. Leet is generally fully spelt out, just with number and other characters filling in for letters.
In addition, I don't see this as being that much of a problem. I am of a slightly older age group (18 as opposed the 15 and 16 year olds of the article), but neither I nor any of my peers would ever write like that, it's just stupid. In addition I have never seen this in a paper (and yes, I have read papers of people who, according to the article, would be likely to do that), be it fiction or not, except in dialog that would have occured in that medium. I guess we just need to teach these kids that what they are doing is not english, its stupid.
---
Kwanza is not a Polish holiday!
Part of what middle school and high school english is attempting to teach is the discipline of writing. The formal presentation of an idea or subject to prepare a student for college. That process is a difficult one, even when you you don't abuse the language. My high school english teacher used to return my papers bleeding with red ink. Over the course of the year as I focused more on the writing and developing good habits, my papers became less and less bloodied by red ink. That's the process and discipline of writing that chatroom abbreviations shortcut. I applaud the teachers for dinging the students on it and I hope it continues to be treated as an error nationwide. I sincerely hope that the laxing of standards does not allow this to become acceptable in formal writing.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
...languages change over time because people change. It's a sad truth, but it's possible that 50 years from now, "you" will be spelled "u". Or shall we be correct ans say "thou"? :)
Somehow, I doubt that the majority of current teenage students using typing shortcuts in their writing are doing so without thought. If every book they've read and teacher they've had has shown them differently, why the sudden switch to chat lingo now?
I haven't read the article yet, but I would suspect coolness and laziness play more of a role in this than ignorance. Teachers coming down hard (as they should) will stamp this out.
-s
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
+h3 c0rr3c+ 4n5|/\|3r 15 "nu+z".
Eubonics for geeks.
And just as stupid.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Ok.. my question is if eubonics are given special treatment then why not l33tsp3k?? This is a form of discrimination, it's stomping on my national rights to my techno heritage, schools should be teaching this to everyone, we should have collage courses on the history of l33tsp3k!!
This is an outrage, it's all ment to put the teksavvy down, power to the people!! Make your voice heard!!
Just remember that language changes with the time. If not we'd still be talking in Old English. With that said, I'm not supporting what the kids are doing; they need to learn proper grammar and spelling. However, people trying to crack down on l337 speak in all forms should keep in mind that we don't use Shakespear's English anymore.
"All great truths begin as blasphemies." -George Bernard Shaw
I don't see why this issue would be giving teachers headaches. How hard is it to draw a red "F" on a piece of paper? ;-)
I DERIDE L3375p3@k, and that Godless, contextless satan-spawn that is IM.
In the days when I DID actually use IM (because it seemed at first a simple tool to talk to someone when I didn't actually desire to hear their voice on the phone. It took just a couple of weeks to get over that) I was always the guy who got the message "Are you still there???" because I took the time to spell everything out the way it should be.
Languages change over time. No one during that time period likes it, but its a simple fact. Ask your parents about the slang that they used that their parents hated, chances are that there are words that are now common usage. If you go even farther back, you'll find that "English" was barely recognizable.
For example, the line from Chaucer in Middle English, "The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne / Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne," while somewhat recognizable today, is still obviously not the same. Even further back, to the time of Beowulf (the story, not the cluster), and you get "HWÆT WE GARDE / na in geardagum eodcyninga". Believe it or not, this is still considered a form of English, albeit Old English.
The modification of a language over time is both normal and, unfortunately for us old-timers (I'm 30), traumatic. G3t 0v3r 17 :-)
If /.ers had an assignment to hand in, how many 'rediculous' and 'definately' and 'flexable's will be used?
Why is it that so-called "teachers" are unable (or unwilling) to learn new modes of speech? You would think that by learning to understand AOL-style chat text, that teacher would set an example for students: be adaptive. After all, isn't it better to understand multiple speech/text modes, instead of helplessly clinging to antiquated modes that have diminishing relevance in today's world?
I think most teachers are lazy idiots, and this story only reinforced that opinion.
There should have been no headaches for teachers or hesitation in penalizing the students for using misspellings or "net slang". There is a difference between casual conversation and formal usage of your language, and schoolwork is of the latter category.
Some of us don't even use that kind of slang on the internet. The truth is that it was created by people who either cannot type well or who type lazily. Those of us who understand that effective communication is important realize that typing in complete, correctly spelled, and well formed sentences with correct puncuation gets our ideas across in a more accurate way.
Of course, that doesn't mean that we have no spelling or grammatical errors -- it simply means that we try to communicate our ideas using grammar that is correct. It also creates less confusion for us, because we don't have to remember in what context we're writing and "turn on" or "turn off" our grammar rules.
RP
The examples are all trivial to replace with the non-shortcut version except, perhaps, "2". It's just a shorthand. Of course, for "formal writing", you shouldn't turn in something with shorthand, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't write it that way. It's not really different from underlining titles (titles should be italicized; underlining is a handwriting/typewriter shorthand for italics) or writing in cursive.
It's not like they're using inconsistant spelling and abbreviating things all over the place like, say, Shakespear.
those are 30 year old guys posing as girls...
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I haven't had much of a problem as of yet with elite haX0r speak invading my real world, but I have had a problem with constantly typing 'look' and enter or 'score' and enter or 'inv' and enter while on ICQ or IRC. I guess playing time on Sojourn3 is catching up with me again.
Oh well,
who sort
I guess that's what we get for living online these days.
l
sc
Duris MUD - The best pkill MUD. Ever.
eh?
Not is the teenage/pre-teen world forming bad habits, but there are a lot of people in the world that pretty much learn english in chatrooms, and you better believe they consider this to be perfectly acceptable conversation language.
I suppose, what bothers me the most is that it just looks and feels retarded. I remember thinking back to first grade, when we were all still learning how to spell. Sometimes it took a while for it to kick in that YOU is not spelled U just because they sound the same. Or SUN/SON, etc etc. With first graders, its an acceptable faux pas. To do so intentionally when you clearly know better is at the height of moronic. I understand the need/desire to abbreviate long words sometimes, but u for you, r for our/are and the extra retarded ur for your, just makes NO credible sense.
And while sometimes I'm willing to write off this stuff as the juvenile swill from those "Damn teenagers", when I see people in their 20's+ doing it, it just makes me sick.
Well, sick is perhaps too strong a word. It just makes me feel artifically intellectually superior to them, and I no longer want to spend my time conversing. Of course, there's always the chance that my assumptions are correct... and perhaps that explains it.
Ok, rant done. Moderate as you will.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I say "btw" (for those who don't know.. that's 'by the way') out loud fairly often. It is always followed by something of added significance (hence the expression.. by the way).
:)
Nobody has ever asked me what I meant. They either know what it is, are too embarrassed to ask, or it is irrelevant as the following sentance seems complete without it
..mork
Yes, I once had an email like that. I hate txt'er/l33t speak at the best of times, but important business emails are definately not the place and it took me twice as long as usual to work out what on earth they were going on about.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
...is people who make mistakes in english when trying to write proper english. I often get email with spelling mistakes such as: forth instead of fourth, wich instead of which, parliment instead of parliament or suppose to instead of supposed to... and the list goes on and on.
Often this is from people who are well educated, PHDs and MBAs. English isn't my first language and even I notice these errors.
Quite frankly I'd take L33T speak when appropriate and voluntary over spelling mistakes in common english.
- you are sofa king weed todd did
I remember a big discussion a few years ago about Ebonics mentioned at CAL HERE . Charles J. Fillmore writes in a linguist look at Ebonics Debate that "[it is a] truism that people can't learn from each other if they don't speak the same language." I don't necessarily believe all the "Ebonics is a good idea" debates but what Fillmore points out is true. I think the question raised is should students learn proper English, which is immensely useful in the real world, or should the teachers learn the Chatnoics in an attempt to reach the children. I personally think both arguments have merit.
h3110 l4mUrz,
1 4m a 15 yr 0ld h4X0r/cr4ckX0r, 4nd i th3nk th4t th3s
4rtuka1 t0tal1e SUXXZZ0ORZ!!!! i 4m more s/\/\a4tur
then 4ll j00 0lde phart PUNKX0r S1S-4DMINZ c0mbinde!#%
JOO PH33R MY 133t \/\/r1t1ng 5K33LZ, i w1ll p1ngn00k joo
and fr4ggX0r jur ARSE in c0uNtArStRiEk!!! i am 1337..
4LL J00R B4S3 R B3L0NGZ 2 US!!!!!
---===[[[{{{N33T-0 31337-0}}}]]]===--- [xRc]
st00pid 20 s3kond w4t3.. i wuz dun in 6
Yes, language evolve. Yes, slang is an accepted part of casual English. Blah, blah, yakkity, smackitty, bring me a nice, big glass of OJ.
However, in a formal setting - and by formal, I mean the workplace, any education setting (As a teacher, or as a student), or the media (newspaper, magazines, etc.), a standard basic form of the language is necessary so that the average person can understand what is being said or written.
This means leaving out slang that specific to an activity, ethnic group or region. (IE: Netspeak, ebonics, or southern "American"). It also includes spelling, grammer and basic editing for clarity of thought.
-Notes-
*Slashdot is -not- a formal setting, so put that red pen away now and stop correcting my spelling. I don't care enough to hit the spellchecker.
*AVERAGE person. Not "Drooling moron", not "Ignormus who never bothered to pay attention in school.", and not "Non-speaker of the language."
http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?3357354385
When I see people slaughtering English, this is what I think of. A horrendously fat 43 year old man. Unemployed, unshowered, unmoving. Living in his parents' garage. Moldy pizza boxes stacked everywhere. The only light in the garage is the eerie blue glow of a monitor; the only sound the clacking of keys. The man is pretending to be a 16-year old girl in a racy AOL "adults only" chat room. And then he decides that seventeen keystrokes can be shortened to three. "Laughing out Loud" becomes "LOL". Newspeak for the electronic age. Next time you feel lazy, think of that man. He's still sitting there, finding newer and better ways to squeeze the life out of your language. Think of him, and type seventeen characters instead of three. You'll get carpal tunnel sooner, but at least you won't be "that" guy.
It might not be "l33t" speak (or even IM shorthand), but the NY Times article should have added "lose" and "loose" (and their variants) to the list of misused words.
It seems that nearly every day I see a post on a message board or in a student's assignment (my wife is an English teacher) where "loose" has been used where "lose" is supposed to be (with using "loosing" instead of "losing" being very common as well). For the confused, "lose" and "losing" refers to something being lost, deleted, misplaced, etcetera, while "loose" and "loosing" generally refers to something being free of physical restriction (such as loosing a rope from its mooring on a pier).
I'm glad that the NY Times is bringing this up (and that it's being discussed on Slashdot). While it's true that we tend to use slang online or in casual conversation, if reports, business letters, or any other type of formal communication includes slang, it only results in the document's author being perceived as less intelligent. English is a great, albeit frustrating, language. The more of us that learn and practice its proper use, the better we'll all be. Good luck to all the other teachers out there.
Ok, is it any coincidence that The Times uses a picture of a hot young girl in a comely pose to illustrate this article?
Eve Brecker but DAMN. She's gonna get lots of email from this article. The next Ellen Feiss?
seriously, i know teachers have thier stuff to do, but the whole basis of this l337 talk is to make thinsg easy when called for and diffucult when called for. I have been out of school for 2 years, but when I was in school, our teachers tryed to comunicate with the studenst a little and tryed to find out what they actualy ment.... it wasnt did you get teh questiosn right, it was how the feelings showed on your paper.
R the wordz of Prince xcellently timed 4 the NPG 2B 2gether B4 the youth of 2day?
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
If abbreviations are used enough they become slang.
LASER is one example.
RTFM - there are people who don't know what this stands for, but know what it means.
FUBAR
SWAG
<meta name="version" value="Yet another re-write of something I lost interest in years ago">
<title>I don't care about this essay</title>
<content>foobar</content>
<meta name="teachers_comment" value="Why are you wasting my time?">
<meta name="detention" value="true">
<meta name="grade" value="F-">
Elcomeway otay Ethay Ewnay Orkyay Imestay onway ethay Ebway!
Orfay ullfay accessway otay ourway itesay, easeplay ompletecay isthay
implesay egistrationray ormfay.
Asway away embermay, ou'llyay enjoyway:
Inway-epthday overagecay andway analysisway ofway ewsnay eventsway
omfray Ethay Ewnay Orkyay Imestay EEFRAY
Upway-otay-ethay-inutemay eakingbray ewsnay andway evelopingday
oriesstay EEFRAY
Exclusiveway Ebway-onlyway eaturesfay, assifiedsclay, oolstay,
ultimediamay andway uchmay, uchmay oremay EEFRAY
IGNINGSAY UPWAY ISWAY ASWAY EASYWAY ASWAY 1-2-3
EATECRAY ANWAY ACCOUNTWAY
1 4m 4gh45t! Wh4t w0ndr0u5 b3auTy d0th 3v3 p0rtr4ay uP0n m1n3 scr33n? Sw33t sw33t 3v3, th1n3 gl0rY d0th 3ntR4nc3 m3, 1 mu5t kn0w th3 sw33t 3mbr4c3... 3r... w41t, 1n thr33 y34a5, 1 m43n... h3h h3h... d4mn y0u n3w y0rk t1m3s f0r n0t m4k1ng h3r 1m4g3 3xp4nd4bl3 1n th3 h4ll0w3d c0nfin35 0f my br0ws3r w1nd0w!
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
English isn't the only language to be facing that, though -- SMS messages have been doing it to other languages likewise.
In my History of French class last semester, our teacher mentioned that some linguists think the widespread use of abbreviations such as "kelk1" for "quelqu'un" may be a force that will alter spelling over the next generation or so. We'll see -- while in some cases, I would be glad for the simplification, in most I think it's needlessly destroying the words.
The instant official spellings of ordinary words start including numbers is the instant I renounce the language that's doing it....
When the cyber world starts leaking into the real world, it should send up a red flag.
Houston, we have idiotic, arrogant kids...
Linguistic evolution is double plus good.
"This is giving the teachers headaches in trying to grade the assignments..."
Maybe I'm not seeing the teacher's dilemma here. The students use 'R' or 'U', they get negative marks, simple as that. And I have to agree with one of the earlier posts-- If they can't seperate their chatting with school, then there are other, more serious problems beyond the overuse of shorthand. In fairness, there have been times, however fleeting, that I've been tempted to "Lol!" instead of chuckle or laugh. And I routinely use "thanx". But then, I'm not being graded either (but I'm sure using LOL in a real conversation would earn a few strange looks...)
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Or are they writing this stuff by hand? (I haven't read the article, so ignore me if it's in the article).
How many of you even learned (much less recall ) that ok is not a word, the correct spelling is okay? I'll bet none of those teachers marking down new words like "r" and "u" mark down "ok".
English teachers do not define the language, use defines the language. We only need english teachers because we need a common starting point, but once we have that we need to move byond them and their rules that don't work. "r" and "u" are two very useful reforms of english spelling. I just wish that the rest of the needed reforms would come in my lifetime so I can spell correctly.
I hate to start like this, but...
When I was a child, my grandmother made me read out loud to her. And if I fudged the pronounciation of anything, she made me get it right. I hated it.
Now I realize that she has done me a great service for I can read and speak much clearer and with better enunciation than most of those around me.
Similarly, if you do not know that terms like 'u', 'r', and ':)' are not to be considered proper forms of the written language, then you will look like a blithering fool later on. Can you imagine someone making a million dollar pitch and filling it with LEET SPEAK? I don't think he will get very far unless he intends to use this as a marketing ploy.
I think that the teachers are doing a disservice to anyone whom they tolerate with their 'net abbreviations.
I think that one of the most important things you can learn in school is the proper way to write. Ebonics and L33t should never wiggle their way into school.
:)
However, you have to wonder what it would sound like if you had L33t Ebonics.
I can't believe they are just starting to give a penalty for poor spelling. I don't care how much time you spend in a chatroom, when you are writing a paper, isn't the first step a draft, and the second step to proof-read? Do we not teach proof reading to kids anymore? In this great and modern day of age, apparently we are just relying on the computer to fix our work for us, and when we have to actually write something with a pen and paper, we don't even think to proof read.
I had to proof read when I was in elementary school and high school. And I'm only 22. I just don't get it. Teachers are just too lax with the students. The basics are no longer being taught.
I have no signature
Love it! "I say, old chap, you appear to have come to a hasty demise at my hands! So much for you much-vaunted superiority!"
Nothing drives me up the wall faster than someone I'm trying to converse with online or in email using an abbreviation for a three or four letter word. I don't mind people abbreviating longer words - Dr. for Doctor, Prof. for Professor, anti-d. for antidisestablishmentarianism, etc, etc. But it strikes me as sheer laziness and in some ways, disrespect, to not be willing to type "you are" instead of "u r." It makes the conversation harder to read, for the most part.
It's not like the people who use IMs and ICQs and IRCs all the time don't get enough practice to have a reasonable typing speed. Spell it out, people!
I despise replacements for the words "you" and "are" because they're only 3 letters long. RTFM, wb and RABUF are one thing, but 'u' for 'you'? how lazy can you get?!
I get pissy with people for doing it in IRC. if I do become a teacher, I will fail them, and have them(after so many warnings) write an essay on the importance of proper spelling.
As for my own spelling, well... that's just because I suck at it. get over it.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
As a card carrying geek, even though I'm heading into middle age and middle management, I find myself reading way "2 much L33T SP33X, D00D."
... "Well, like, he said she said they said that Brit'ny did what'ch call it and then..." I don't hold out much hope. "Hear what I say blood?" and "Wazzup?"
Its a reflection of the anti-establishment spirit in too many of us. (Like "Tiny Tim" McVeigh's final statement, a reading of "Bloodied but unbowed." What an ignorant ass-hole. Couldn't even come up with his own last words.)
That's bad enough, but the IM/Chat room abbreviated drivel is something else.
At issue is the unavoidable tendency of human beings to be fuckin' lazy.
This would not be a problem if typing was as fast and as unskilled as speech (ever listen to most conversations? Eaves drop on people for a couple of hours one day and you'll be going: "Yuck!")
But its not and it demands physical coordination from people who find hard enough to marshal a thought or to wrestle a meme to the ground.
Hence the rapid adoption of contractions and the birthing of illiterate drivel. Pray for rapid advances in speech recognition so that correct writing and spelling becomes as effortless as speech.
As for having some content
Still its better than some moron spewing some religious tract and extoring death.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Education starts AT home.
I say fail the kids, and CALL the parents!
Don't call the parents to have them reprimand the kids, but to ask what they are doing to help the kids.
When I was in school, my parents looked over everything that I turned in, Period. Yes, I Spent a vast majority of my childhood downloading p0rn (used only because on corp network that screens for the normal word) and speaking with " hey, what r u doing later?" etc. Although if I had ever put that in something that my parents looked over, I would have had to do it over again, not correct it, but start over.
It is 9:30pm, what website is your child browsing?
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
Hahaha that's great, like honestly that's just funny.
I will admit that I have accidently written "skool" on a paper on more than one occasion, but i always catch it almost right away. I catch it most of the time thanks to Word Spellcheck underlining, but i've written it out with a pen too. It's just a habit that people develope, as is people spend more time typing to friends online than they do writing novels and essays.
As has been said a couple of times it's not 1337 speak it's just internet short hand. Who really cares what the kids are doing, like seriously, this isn't the first time this has happened. Words like "can't, and won't" came about from other words because people are lazy. It's not some huge flaw of human nature, it's just common sense. In this case though the common sense is blurred as there is a downside to the lazyness, that downside being more confusing writing.
Words may end up evolving, there's no use in whining about it. If you like one way use it. If you like another way use it. Whichever path you choose to venture down be aware of consequences that people won't understand you, or will think you're an idiot. And if you fall victim to the consequences, live up to it don't just say it's a habit you can't break, cause then you're just a dumbass.
At least my name's not Jerry.
That said, standard (but always changing) English is still the standard. Teachers just need to be flexible. The flexibility by one teacher (u and r ok in rough drafts, but not in the final draft) was nice to see.
What's sad about this news is that it seems to show that students are spending (far) more time reading "L33T" speak than any other form of english.
I firmly believe that it's impossible to learn grammar soley by learning its rules. The best way to learn proper english is to read it--often--and get a feel for what is acceptable and what isn't. I doubt that anyone actively reading books would be able to make these mistakes.
Thus, I think the best solution is not to limit access to instant messaging, but rather to encourage kids to read more.
Remember "Ebonics"? In my school district, we had a department head who was convinced that ebonics was an actual language. He wanted it taught, like it had some value, or was on equal ground with English, French, German, Italian, etc.
It didn't take long for him to get pimp-slapped by those of us who actually care about what kids are being taught. I'm not sure, but I think that teacher was forced to retire.
...so why worry about it?
Net stuff gives good trash talk before a fight.
I have trouble enough devising torments for al-Qaida terrorists and you want me to deal with AOL users as well? Cut a Lord of Hell and Chaos some slack, please?
There just isn't room enough in either Hell, Gehenna, Tartarus or Helheim to handle all the AOL users, so I have to resort to reincarnating them as cockroaches. Will that prove satisfactory?
--
Lucifer Morningstar
CEO, Damnation Incorporated
Another one of my pet peeves along these lines: Putting the dollar sign after a dollar amount. "This cost me 50$" instead of "This cost me $50". Again, the writer is thinking in terms of how it's spoken, not written.
Finally, the teacher is herself affected by the most insidious use of writing directly as one speaks: The use of "like" as a pause, with implied content. She says "It was like `Get with it, Bova,'" when she means "The students were thinking, 'Get with it, Bova'".
The use of like is not just incorrect, it's also potentially confusing. "She said my shoes were ugly, and I'm like 'Whatever, bitch.'" Did the speaker literally say "Whatever, bitch" to her detractor, or was it merely thought? We can't tell.
I'll leave the rant about literally vs. figuratively to another poster.
Interstingly enough, netspeak has invades my speaking vocabularly, but not my writing. And i've been doing online bb's almost half my life.
;-).
When I say see you later.
I'm really thinking: "CYA"
Luckily I'm not a cartoon, so my talking comes out as a sound
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
D34r /\/\is74 b1Z07ch!
\/\/3 h4v3 4l\/\/4y5 pr0m073d 7h3 u5493 0f "L337 5p34k" 1n 0ur h0m3XXor5 4nd f1nd yu0r pr4c71c35 4n 1nfr1n93m3n7 0n b0bb135 f1r57 4m3ndm3n7 r1g75!!
w3rd up b1o7ch! u h34rin9 fr0m 0ur l4\/\/y3r!!! 900d luXXor5 w17h 7h47 734ch3r5-un10n r3pr353n74710n 1n cu0r7!! ---l8r n00b!
I hate Grammar Nazi's
I remember my middle school English teacher complaining that we were using 'goto' as one word. Using GOTO in Apple BASIC was the culprit.
wtf r these guys talking about. im talk is not nearly that pervasive in school
like im a student and ive never seen ne1 write a paper in all lower case using stupid im abbr or sl@ng and w/o ne punctuation. u got to be kidding me. all the kid in my class use perfectly good english grmamar speling and punctuation on all their work and they pluralize all their word correctly and watch not to make any runon. like if ne1 turned in a paper like they say on that site 2 1 of my prof the prof would own their ass. i think some1 shuold talk to these nytimes fool and tell them their artical is just a bunch of fud.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Both slashdot and the person that posted could be up for legal trouble for copyright infringment.
If that doesn't bother you, then why don't you log on with phoney information and post the article here yourself rather than asking someone else to break the law?
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
After reading the posts I noticed that one thing was missing "the Teachers." As most schools start to cut budgets and also those old bitties that we had as teachers are now retiring. So new teachers are coming in. They range from 24yo and up. Long story short the teachers have been using this media for 10-20 years. The students have been since birth. It's only a natural progression.
side note I remember cursive. I remember telling my teacher in second grade that it won't last and then (pointing to a dusty old C64 covered in the corner) and said "that's how we will write."
I was watching reruns of connections2 the other day, and in one episode James Burke was talking about the invention of the printing press.
apparently since everything before that time was hand written, people wrote both books and correspondence in a kind of shorthand that is not unlike the 'chat room' speak of today. and of course they did it for the same reason... to save time.
apparently mass produced books were resisted at first because they were not written using scripts or syntax that looked like what people were used to. the invention of the italic type helped on the script front, but i guess we lost the abbreviations.
anyway he was not talking about the gutenberg bible, so this must have pertained more to mass production of books than just the first printing press.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
Leet \Leet\, n. [Etymol. uncertain.] (Zo["o]l.)
The European pollock.
L33t!?
If you are using a computer, it isn't hard to type the entire word. Things like r -> are (or possibly our sometimes) don't save any time on a keyboard. Quite often I see abbreviations that work out only 1 character less than the actual word.
The other thing that comes hand in hand with the abbreviations are the lack of punctuation, capitals, or grammer. I have had entire e-mails with no capitals or full stops. It takes a long time to work out what is going on. And people claim they couldn't be bothered using the shift key (or whatever). Surely it takes more effort (if you ever learnt to type properly) to remember to not use the shift key?
I have kicked people off a mailing list I administer because they don't make any sense for the reasons above. I don't reply fully to e-mails, I just tell them to send it again so that I can understand it.
I also find that the people who send the mails like that tend to be quite stupid. I got an e-mail along the lines of:
"do u knw abt undergorund rails"
That was it. I asked what he meant by underground rails. The reply was like this:
"undergorund rails in croydon"
I again asked what he meant by underground rails in Croydon, as it is quite ambiguous, and the area very large. Response:
"my dad told me"
At this point, I wrote an e-mail explaining how much easier it would be for him to just type properly and explain what he meant. I think he wanted me to tell him all I knew about underground features in the area, but I couldn't be bothered because of his attitude.
Yes, there is a place for them on phones and SMS as they aren't easy to type on (even with practice, you can't do 80wpm on a numeric pad). There is also a place for acronyms, such as LOL, BTW, BRB etc. because they actually save a lot of time.
I can tell some bastard is going to send me SMS speak mails now just to wind me up...
You proper english types will be in a world of hurt when it comes to the point where the language has mutated to the point where it is all leet speek. Languages change over time. Its a fact. You cant stop it, the french try real hard.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
They try to help you fit. You try and get a job here writing like that, you'll quickly learn that whatever the position, if you can't write properly, you can't get it.
There is a whole world between what you do everyday with your buddies and what you can do in the real world.
I talk (rarely write) quite loosely, but I am also very capable of giving a speech or simply talking with some suits in a most learned manner. It is a matter of who or where.
If when required to you can't write in a suitable way, it's not because you speak a different language. It's because _you_ were too lazy to learn to write in the first place.
It's only when you can play by the rules that you can break them. If you break them because you just don't know them and can't be bothered to learn, then you are the fool.
In my opinion, Scientology is a cult you should avoid.
One of the the things I have always loved about the English language is its democratic elitism. Permit me to explain. Some languages, such as French, actually have a body that decides formally what consitutes the language.
English doesn't do that. English does have an elite that decides what is in the standard language, but that elite is the collection of writers, editors, and lexicographers who work with the language in the modes of cultural production. So, what Standard English is is decided by a literate elite, but membership in this literate elite is open to anyone based on merit.
But that is not all. Beneath that "high brow" crowd who write literature and scan literature for new usage, there are hundreds of thousands of idiomatic communities speaking and using untold varieties of English. These are not "Standard English," but they are living, breathing, socially functional dialects of English. From time to time, a writer of genius emerges from such a community and brings new usage, idioms, and ways of speaking into that "staid and stuffy" elite. Those portions that speak in new ways, ways that other communities of English find useful, get taken up by the English speaking world at large. Then we find these new usages showing up both in other dialect communities, and in the elite world of "Standard English."
Thus the world of Standard English is reactionary, conservative, and resistant to change, but this is as it should be. This is the force of stability that allows us to read (albeit with difficulty for some) six hundred year old Elizabethan English, like Shakespeare, and should allow English speakers six hundred years from now to read Toni Morrison or Neal Stephenson. At the same time, the vernacular throbs with creativity. Vibrant and electric new words, phrases and idioms crackle into being every day. Most are lost. Some appear only in the margins, in the throw away dialoge of television scripts, or in idiom spoken by characters in novels; mere markers in the history of the language. Some, however, merge into that conservative realm where they join such everyday poetry as "being blue," or "flight of stairs."
I've studied only a few of the world's languages, but so far English is my one true love. Latin and French have their charms for me, but English owns my mind. I treasure both the stodgy elite (which anyone may join; all one must do is add to the great literature of the English language -- no problem!), and the endless, almost frantic, creativity of everyday speakers of English.
Bearing in mind all of the foregoing, schools are not there to institutionalize the random creativity of English. That takes care of itself. They are there to be sure that we all have access to the stodgy collection of Standard English, so we may get our random creativity past the reactionary gatekeepers of the language. All good literature simultaneously reveres the language and subverts it. The most striking example, to me, is "Huckleberry Finn," the first novel with real American voices in it, as opposed to a bunch of Americans speaking more or less just like British speakers of English. Reverence and subversion.
While I still have nightmares about red inked "PV" (passive voice) all over my writing, her anal retentiveness made me a better writer. (This post notwithstanding.)
-sk
I'm a roleplay MUSHer. (As opposed to social MUSHers, the other half of our particular subspecies of text-gamers.)
I do, occasionally, try to type 'look' while talking to someone.
But... you know, not only have I never turned in a paper with an IM abbreviation on it, I don't even use IM abbreviations in IMs. I can understand using them with cellphone text messages, where each letter takes a certain amount of time, but it amazes me how the same person who spends hours every day online in a text-based world... can have no idea how to properly converse in text.
Maybe if we were to actually start beating the IMers into using something resembling real English--a few abbreviations are one thing, every other word is quite another--then they'd have less problems in school.
In fact... you know, I think this is my civic duty. Quick, someone, fetch me my beating stick!
It may sound strange, but this can have an end soon. Kids are using this "typing" slang just because it's much more easier (not about data size, but about "easiness").
Note that this "easieness" will end when typing becomes obsolete, and voice chatting becomes the standart. What will happen then?
I see two probable scenarios. People still keep typing (and probably writing) this way, creating a useless habit, that can only be explained in the historical context. Other scenario is this kind of typing dies just like many other slangs, and our grandchildren will laugh at us when we show this to them. ;o)
As Matt Growening (spelled correct?) preview. In year 3001 well spell xmas instead of christmas ;o)
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Step 1: L33t.
Step 2: Convince someone official that L33t is an ethnic dialect and I should get a government grant to teach L33t in middle class white suburban schools.
Step 3: PROFIT!!!
Ebonics, anyone?
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
American education has tried and failed
to use a 'natural' approach to mathematics.
Creating a generation of students who find
even basic mathematics a real challenge.
Education is supposed to be hard work.
It is a long process of accumulation.
If the first layers are weakly grasped
then the rest does not stick.
L33t may be cool but coolness is not the same
as a well-trained brain able to handle the
complex problems we face in our world.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
"Spell checkers are not bad if they do not have to rely on them."
;)
...
"... but now they most definately are."
I definitely agree with you.
OMG ! WTF is going on in our Schoolz ? Get those kidz to RTFM will ya ?
http://nomoneydownnews.com/
Languages evolves and nothing we do can change that. Look at the difference between UK english and American english. Compared to eachother UK english seems very uptight and American english as childish school yard slang.
Let the languages evolve, its perfectly normal and nothing that will end the world. My native language, swedish, has evolved so much in the last 200 years that old written swedish is hardly readable today. Since communication is so much faster today its inevitable that the evolution in the language goes much faster too. What in those days took 200 years may now take a mere 20 years.
HTTP/1.1 400
I do tech support for a software company, and I swear that most of my customers are the laziest people out there. Not only do they use 1337, they drop words to shorten a sentence and just hope I can understand. We primarily serve well educated coperations and business people/professionals. With all their vast experience, I swaer they are the worst. I added a few examples of my wonderful customers!
:-)
(These are actual email, the whole of which have been provided to you. This is the extent of what they send me when they need help.)
**
found everything except code for mailbox addon
can you help
**
well after 3 days of of trying to get your program to work i give up i
expect u will remove credit card charge i can not afford 2 pay for
something i can not use
(This guys problem was that he did not know how to copy and paste the registration code.)
**
when i register it won't let me paste the reg number if i fill in my name and click it says not the right license no it pretty much impossible to type the reg no in the problem is i used the trial and it is perfect for get what i need grr when i unpack the update the error is a file is null and i should bring up the binary something or other
(??? Anyone else get that?)
**
do u have a reaseler in mass ??
nor will u like 2 have one ? what is the total product cost of sftwre
mail me back
**
BUYING UR SOFTWARE
(She was really descriptive. She ended up needing help registering the software.)
**
i hvae query if u don mind please consider this matteris any tool 2 find out all incomming and out going mail from my net work(ie all the mail should stored in to one place)..................
(Spying on your employees? Naughty naughty.)
**
Well, you get the idea. It seems that communication simply breaks down more and more the longer people go uncorrected in their grammer through mostly impersonal email. Scholls should definetly be nailing this down now before kids get used to it and my job gets all the more difficult.
"Victims, aren't we all?"
It isn't laziness, but the lack of any real typing skills
It has to be this... on IRC and in games I can easily out-type anyone using "short hand" while I type full words.
Once upon a time I was a very fast typist (>100 wpm), but it's gone down to probably around 70 wpm nowadays. Sure, that's still fast, but any touch typist should be able to type faster than I can if they aren't typing full words.
Perhaps it should become a requirement to teach kids to touch-type at an earlier age
It should probably be taught shortly after writing skills. Being able to type is just as important as being able to write nowadays. I know some people will blanch at that, but take the average office worker and compare how much they have to type into a computer versus how much they have to write down on a piece of paper.
I just hope that schools have gotten out of the dark ages regarding touch typing. I recall going to a school competition around 1990. I entered into the typing competition since I knew I was a fast and accurate typist. I don't think I got more than a couple sentences done though -- I was definitely not expecting to have to deal with an electric typewriter that didn't even process line breaks properly. I spent more time being amazed at how backwards the competition was than I did actually typing.
NYTeemes repurts oon hoo cummun chet ruum/IM shurtcoots (sooch es 'oo' fur yuoo, 'r' fur ere-a, itc) ere-a creepeeng intu zee clessruum und humoourk esseegnments frum thuse-a teenege-a keeds thet spend a seegnifficunt emuoont ooff teeme-a in chet prugrems. Um gesh dee bork, bork! Thees is geefing zee teechers heedeches in tryeeng tu grede-a zee esseegnments, mooch less understund zeem becoose-a ooff zee technu-genereshun gep, und tu try tu prefent foorzeer eboose-a ooff zee lungooege-a, hefe-a begoon peneleezing stoodents fur useeng zee net slung. Stoodents sumeteemes dun't ifee reeleeze-a zeey use-a zee chet ruum shurthund unteel it's pueented oooot tu zeem, becoose-a thet methud ooff chetteeng hes becume-a secund netoore-a tu zeem.
There are two arguments here.
;)
1. In spoken conversation, the most important and practical objective is for both parties to understand what is being communicated, and on some level of agreement. Therefore, using slang, tone of voice, expressive sounds, etc. should be encouraged to allow effective communication. Online chatting is really a typographical way of speaking.
2. In written language, precisely because of a lack of meta language it is important that we agree on a syntax that allows for exact (or reasonably close) interpretation of what is being communicated. Substitution opens the door for non-standard communication, and this crowd understands the importance of standard protocol for communication. Students must learn and prove that they have learned this before they grow up to become a functional illiterate of society like the rest of us
So is this a sign of geek discrimination when l33tspeak is punished in schools but ebonics is rewarded? Should we contact the ACLU to protect our rights to type like idiots?
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
What a hoot!
Slashdotters, the shining example of bad grammar, incoherent sentences and profound inability to spell a word correctly, are complaining about kids in school using jargon...
Do as I say, not as I do, eh?
Indeed, I concur.
Through a simple name change (and the change was viewable by ALL, mind you) I became "SkipTheOp" and galavanted around the irc chat room as if I was indeed an Op (short for 'one with operator priveleges')
It was not until a few minutes later when I harassed the piss out them all the while exclaiming "I AM A BOT" that they realized they had been 'famfoozled.'
Ahhh, to be young and dumb!
P.S.- I am a bot.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
he's probably a 133+ g4mz3r!
I completely agree. I took tons of AP/IB classes in preparation for college, but, arguably, the most useful class at my prep school was Typing 101. It helped me churn out papers in college, and helps me code without looking at the keys now. Not to mention the fact that one can never reach a "zen programming" state without touch-typing.
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
Now mabie these newbie lamers can learn to upgrade their language.lib. When speaking not to your "l337 friends, that'll k1ll jue f0r ./makking --fun +./of them" 1 can only hope their /usr/manfile will kill all -9 what ever homework.obj is reported to their inbox.java for syntax errors, no include private lang.lib.swing.poser.elite statement nor did it include stdio*.all. I know i've had the misfortune of seeing a normally good sentence rot to the core due to such statments as: "My friends and 1 r go1ing to the beech 2 day." It was my manner to write: "WTF did you just say? Where's your MAN file on lang.english.common ?!"
I teach summer school for high school students and SAT prep during the school year, and recently this subject came up in my class. I had already thought about this after several years of observing students who were raised using chat room slang.
My take on it is, yes, it will annoy the current generation of teachers, but some of the words will slip into our language. As the article pointed out some teachers are being pretty lenient about correcting these errors. In only a few short years these kids will become teachers themselves, and they will not even think of internet argot as incorrect.
I agree with one of the opinions expressed in the article that this is just the natural evolution of language. I told my class that this will mark the largest shift in the english language that anyone has seen in the last few hundred years. With abbreviations, lack of capitalization and punctation, simplification of verb forms, and the use of graphical symbols to represent entire words, I predict that in less than thirty years, written english will be radically different. We might as well get used to it now :}
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
Somebody get me the IP of that server!
I'm a 2-3 fingers per hand typist and get RSI every now and again. Some of my older female colleagues touch-type and get no aches and pains. I believe them when they blame my RSI on my typing style and posture.
I think the children should be taught to touch-type.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
heh
.. this is what is known as AOLspeak.
The biggest problem with this, to me, is all of the improper spelling (intentional or otherwise) on usenet and mailing lists. Although some will argue usenet is already useless anyway, whenever I have a question on something and I don't know where else to turn, I hit Google Groups and do a search. And I usually find a lot of great information after a little digging through the weeds.
However, as more and more people use 'creative' spelling, intentionally or not, more and more articles are going to become hard to find with a proper search term. Of course, you could argue that the search engines should be able to translate this on the fly, but really that's wasted effort on a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.
I may be snobbish, but I feel that I am a somewhat better person because I am not too lazy to always (at least try to) use proper English, including spelling. Really, how lazy do you have to be to type "4" instead or "for" or "u" instead of "you"? Isn't sloth still a sin (for those who believe in sin, of course)?
it's with anyone who allows this behavior in his chat room. I personally react violently to any us of "u" or "r" (or, god forbid "ur") in any chatroom I'm in. The best way to correct someone, as always, is to ridicule them to the extreme. Only then will they learn.
Back when I was in high school, we had a system called "e" errors.
:^)
If you used the wrong to, two, too, their, there, they're, spelled a lot as one word, or used any contraction in a paper, quiz or even a test, they handed the paper back with a big old E on it.
Quick and easy way to teach someone the writes and wrongs of grammar
Maybe they could call them "3" erors...
We already have a horribly simplified form of the English Language...
I believe people call it US English.
There is no need to use this (l33t speak) type of abbreviation anywhere, it's just plain ugly. I send a vast amount of sms and use irc/im packages a lot yet still manage to avoid it all the time.
This type of "language transformation" and communication difficulty is also a big problem in South Korea, where children use IM services, chat rooms, and internet bullentinboards constantly.
Difference is that they spell things in phonatically.. in a twisted way. that adults can't understand by reading it.
Schools in Korea are more strict in this sense.. and they don't give out much writing assignments so it's less apparent.
It seems to me (as someone who types far too much) that the reason for adapting "wuz" vs "was" is plainly obvious. "wuz"'s letter switch hands. w is a left hand letter, u a right and z a left, whereas "was" is all on the left hand. It is faster to type words alternating letters between your two hands (in fact, certain types of keyboard layouts have been built on this). Therefore, while they have the same number of letters, anybody who spends a lot of time typing can type "wuz" much faster than "was".
He started it..
I would die 4 u...
yeah yeah...
What's more, we'll see it again.
What happened last time? Well, Boston just had a huge flap over whether to conduct classes in Spanish. The answer? None yet but here's more background. And ebonics. Everybody remember ebonics?
Not only is the question evolving, but so is the answer. We recognise that not everyone speaks- or writes- the same language. But people are bilingual without meaning to be. How many people have included an HTML tag in a document? Raise your hands. Be honest. How many people have tried to use tags in a limited-to-plain-text format? Because that's what school english is: it's no smileys, no phone text, use the language and get graded on how well you do with it. No shortcuts, no abbreviations, no shorthand notes. (Remember shorthand?)
How many people can go from writing a full document in HTML to having a verbal conversation in regular speech?
We are already doing it, folks. And we should require of the kids that they live up to the standard: don't mix codes unless they're compatible. Is school english the same as street english? NO! Do we sound different when we call home than when we answer the phone at work? Yes, if we're in an old-school business environment- and if we do, we frequently get recognised for it, no matter what our middle managers can't spell. What's happening is that excellence is having an even greater field for visibility: the more they can't spell or speak in one coherent language at a time, the more those of us who are multilingual and fluent in our many fields look great by comparison.
YES. Grade them accroding to what's required. And acknowledge that there are places where this is acceptable, and that if they don't even know what they're writing, they aren't paying enough attention. They need to know what language they're using, and they need to know how to keep their codes clean. (by the way, this coment is being written by someone whose code is awful, and i'm having to clean it up, too.)
And here is an article to really bend your brain over just how much argument has existed just within the 'what's plain english?' bracket over the years.
For the record, i found a way to keep my Handheld/PDA graffiti out of my handwriting. I use my left hand for their writing system, and my right for regular script. This would probably be more difficult for someone who isn't ambidextrous, but with a little practice works just fine. Picked up the tip from a neuropsych buddy with whom I had a long debate over brain centers and speech.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
For me, I've been essentially a touch-typist since about the 9th grade and it only takes me a few hundredths of a second more to type YOU instead of U.
.
Ok . . . but read your first paragraph . .
I mean, I personally couldn't see how on earth u could b substituting words without noticing it.
So apparently saving the few hundredths of a second was worth it?
D33r MrZ. butts3x0r
Dear Mrs. Endlove,
U g0tz a k1d d4t 41n7 d01n h1z w3rK r1t3, b1zn0tch!
Your son is not completing his assignment correctly, ma'am.
h3 k33p t4lk1n L1k3 h3 41n7 g0tZ n0 c3ntz!
His manner of writing indicates a lack of formative education.
WTF?
I wonder why this might be the case?
U = p3n1s 1n U aZZ!
My experience tells me this is usually the result of poor parenting. For instance, a child's mother may spend more time with her husband or boyfriend than with her child, robbing him of important life lessons.
sux0rz 2BU!
The results of a bad upbringing reflect negatively on the responsible parent.
h0p3 y3r br4t g3tz h1z NUTZ ch0ppa 0ff!
Your son may find it difficult to complete his assignments at school, and may experience ridicule from his peers.
Disclaimer: I'm a big fan of the English language, and I think that it is a good idea to limit severe language deviations, particularly in a formal academic setting. I'm not going to endorse the substitution of 'r' and 'u' for 'are' and 'you', but simply make a point of the roll such things play in the evolution of a language.
... and it's never good news! Furthermore, it's always about primary and secondary school kids.
I'm an American, and I'm studying linguistics (amongst other things) in New Zealand. It's an interesting place to study linguistics, because New Zealand is one of the very few places (if not the only place) where there is a fairly complete aural record of the evolution from it's roots in the United Kingdom to it's modern form.
Language is a hard target to pin down. Even in countries that try to limit linguistic migration (such as France) can't slow it down significantly, even in times without huge revolutions in communication. English is one of the fastest changing, and most diverse languages on the planet, and it only takes the space of about two generations for the "proper" high culture forms of the language to change significantly.
A major shift in communication technology makes the changes occur much, much faster. The advent of radio made western urban American English the "proper" form of American English in the span of about five years. National broadcasters go through an enormous amount of training to develop that accent, as do politicians and other public figures. Listen to Clinton's speeches at the beginning and end of his term, or even how George Bush's (much ridiculed) accent has started to change.
It's expected that the Internet will have the same effect on written languages that the radio had on spoken languages. Interestingly enough, it wasn't until the advent of the newspaper that English spelling (both American and British) became more or less standardized across large geographic regions.
Ironically, the first place to hear about a significant change in language is in the editorial / opinion sections of news papers
Anyhow, I suspect that the practice of using 'oic' and 'l8r' in written English will expand dramatically over the next decade. Distasteful? Perhaps. But keep in mind that there's only one standard for language: the de facto standard.
English seems (at least in High School) to be a strange combination of reading,writing,grammer,speech and concept recognition. To me that means communictation. Communication is a more nebulus subject when you dont really focus on language. An english teacher should not grade so harshly because a student uses l33t speak as much as they use mispellings simply because its not "REAL" english. If a student can successfully communicate a feeling or idea with l33t speak then kudos to them, the focus should be on choosing the most effective form of communication and using that as your medium. If standard english is the best method for your communication (as it will reach a broader or far less technological audience), then not choosing that method should merit a lower grade. Now, im not saying lets just let students use any old language they wish and blow off the real teaching of english, what im saying is that people nowadays have a better recognition mechanism thanks to computers. If your communication method works just fine within the limits of your audiences recognition then lets not punish somone for using the obvious abilities of the human mind. Digital devices (phones,compuers,pagers) have made people open to the idea of "compressed communication", communication that is NOT english but close enough to effectively communicate the originators intent. Lets not have our children be taught by people who are teaching the same way that things were taught 100 years ago. The world is an ever changing place, and we must teach the next generation how to understand what is now and take it further. Lets not stifle our childrens communication just because were scared that they might forget the past.
There's pedantic opposition to Microsoft's style biases, but it's still the best grammar checker around. Microsoft Research did a good job on that thing. It's a real parser for natural language. Microsoft Research used to have a download that let you see the parse tree the grammar checker created, but it doesn't seem to be available any more.
Basically many of us on a few of the technical mailing lists have taken the following stance 6 months ago... If you can't type the whole word but use u ad r and y and ANY kind of 133t you will be ignored and we will NOT answer your question, but you will be notified why we are ignoring you.
If you're going to be lazy, then we wont waste our knowlege on you..
it works... several have started talking like humans again, and the undesireables have went away.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
New Zealand government sent letters to people who had chosen "Jedi" as their religion that they shouldn't have abused the census system, and that Jedi isn't considered a religion, even though a significant number of people chose it (IIRC 2%x5%).
Well, what's wrong with using a little how r u doing 2day? in school? Just because it's government supported doesn't mean it has to be uncreative.. will the world start spinning the other direction and gravity reverse if chat-room speak invades our precious children's minds?
If people want to learn to speak with each other, they'll learn how.. but by getting them all to speak the same we're just enhancing our culture's already monolithic character. Boooring.
It's amazing to see cultural normalization - ahem - education work its crafty art.
I mean seriously. When I was in High School I knew not to use street slang when writing an essay.
I mean think about it when in a school essay did you say things like cool in reference to something being good. Picture this...
"Hamlet was cool cause' it had ghosts and stuff dude."
That's not a generational gap. Or a technological gap for that matter. That's plain old stupidity. I use chat programs and never, and I meen NEVER, would I use slang of any sort in a submission to my boss.
so 4ll j00 l177l3 n00bs w17 p00r Wr171nG Sk1lz...LEARN TO USE ENGLISH!
The Only Person Willing to be Me is ME!
On EFnet, you'll find that certain channels have enforced grammar. In these places, if you "lol" use "u" or "r" or even make a mistake with they're, their, there, it will not only be pointed out, but corrective action will often be taken. I'm a big supporter of this, being as IRC and other "chat" mediums are written mediums for the most part, and it's quite difficult to understand this shorthand if your english isn't terribly good, or if you're a hacker whose used to taking everything literally because it processes faster.
Some people will make the arguement that linguistics states rather plainly that a native speaker cannot ever speak a language incorrectly, and this is true. Many of these people fail to understand that typing and writing is not speaking.
If there is a God, you are an authorized representative. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
At least, it didn't start as the chat rooms. Even just a few years ago (well, ok, 7 years ago when I was in Grade 10) the vile language known as d3wd hadn't propagated fully. Most chatrooms were still havens for people who could actually communicate in properly composed English.
Where the linguistic nightmare first appeared was in games like Diablo, Ultima Online, and Everquest.
nitwit_01 tells you 'cn u plz tp me 2 wc plz'
you reply 'What's that in English?'
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Remember the whole uproar about ebonics? And how its still made fun of? The irony .. its shakesperian compared to IM-speak, and the beauty of it is that IM-speak is mostly used by the kids of the crowd that took issue with ebonics.
..
Ah, the wonderus circle of life
"Old man yells at systemd"
Parents, do you ever bother to look at your child's homework? Do you take the slightest interest in what they are studying? You are supposed to be as much a part of the learning process as the teacher, if not more so!
Yes, I am a parent. Yes, I do look at her homework. Yes, I have forced her to redo a paper I thought was poorly done. I know what she is capable of doing and it is very obvious when she is being lazy.
It pays off. She has been an honor student for the past three years (/me smuggly pats own back as if he was solely responsible).
-- Will program for bandwidth
Even though I'm very good at it, I hate spelling.
English spelling is a travesty, a point made particularly clear to me as a home-schooling parent.
In our initial studies, we determined that teaching our kids to read using a phonetic approach was probably the best. In actual practice, we did see some pretty immediate gains, the oldest two learning to read simple books in just a few short weeks.
There, however, is where progress stopped. We figured that since it was obviously working, we pounded through weeks and months of more lessons, all based on phonics. The number of exceptions, duplicate cases, and whatnot grew, and the lessons became arduous, boring, confusing, and ultimately, fruitless.
Our children lost the desire to read, and it's taken several YEARS of hard work to recover from that. (they now have, thankfully!)
Why would "thought" be spelled so differently from "hot"?
I cood slip into pyoorly fonetic spelling, but most of us will fined that hard too reed, as we're too used to the "spelling power elite's" way of doing it.
Our students spend years learning "phonetic heiroglyphics" when they could be spending this time learning stuff of value - mathematics, sociology, science and history.
Every hour you spend working on memorizing the exceptions to basic phonetic rules is an hour you could have spent playing quake, romancing your girlfriend, reading a book, or studying something useful.
But that's not what's happening, and I feel it is wrong. Millions of man-hours are wasted annually on non-phonetic reading, all to maintain the illusion for those who can spell that they are somehow "brighter".
If a purely phonic (and I do mean PURELY phonic, with no exceptions) spelling/language system were adopted, we'd have 1st grade students routinely able to read virtually any text, and always capable of writing their messages clearly and distinctly.
I feel this goal is a noble one, and this issue is one I'd happily vote for somebody to lobby.
It's just a shame, a real shame, that we waste so much on something so meaningless.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
'then' for 'than'....
On irc and other places, myself and others commonly refer to people who talk like this as "maylays", short for Malaysians (spelling?). We always think they look like complete illiterate idiots when they talk like: "pls ne1 help on the linux???", it's highly annoying.
Get a clue people.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
True, many believe it is due to the generation's laziness, but perhaps we could shed a better light on the use of technology (not limited to the l33t speak). Kids these days are creating more efficient ways of doing things, perhaps caused by laziness, but more efficient nonetheless.
Perhaps we should call it ... Nerdbonics.
what's with this. part of essay writing is gettign the spellign right. it's not 'r' it is 'are'. if it's not right it's wrong. lets teach our kids to concentrate on getting things right not what they can fudge. Geesh.
Obviously l33t speak is something that's easy for the student to fall into if they do it constantly while on the computer. The one thing that should have been a dead stop to this though, is a little thing that came out some number of years ago called "Spell Check"!
I mean really, why on earth would somebody hand in a report/homework to the teacher without first running a spell checker on the work first hand. Personally I know that I would never hand in work that I had done without running it through the spell check at least twice, and having it reveiwed by somebody else. For the simple reason that I know that my spelling and grammer is... err... are horrible.
It boils down to one of two things, students not alert enough to use a spell checker, or even have someone review the work, or there has been a massive failure of the spell checker programs nation wide (probably a result of too much trying to figure out the meaning behind the l33t speak)
-- Never monkey with another Monkey's monkey
People are using short hand like this because when you are hunting and pecking, u is way faster than you. Not so if you touch type. Typing the you doesn't bother you. I think kids should be learning touch typing circa 6'th grade (I'd say earlier, but I guess you're hands should be at least a certain size). Until the keyboard gets replaced as primary user interface anyway.
I was a TA for a third-year computing course in which essays were required, and this problem was fairly common there.
Interestingly, when I taught a first year arts course, this never cropped up at all.
If my enemy's enemy is my friend, what happens if my enemy is his own worst enemy?
Ummmmmmm... I think that was intentionally done as a joke.
0ur F47h3r, wH0 4r7 n h34V3n, h4110w3d b3 7HY n4m3, 7hy k1ngd0m c0m3, 7hy wI11 b d0n3, 0N 34r7h 4s i7 iS iN h34v3n. G1v3 u5 th15 d4y 0ur d4i1y br34d, & f0rg1v3 u5 0ur tr35p45535, 4s w3 f0rg1v3 7h05e wh0 tr35p455 4g41n5t u5. nope...thats still using old english l33t, an entire other dialect...it would be more along the lines of r f47h3r wh0 l1v3Z 1n h34v3n, wh0 0wnZ0r j00, g1v3 u5 0ur f00d, 4nd f0r6iv3n355 u5 f0r 0ur oWnZ1n9s 4nd f14m1n95, a5 w3 f0r91v3 7h053 wh0 0wnz0r 4nd f14m3z u5.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Shakespeare. Not Shakespear. Yes, his crest was someone shaking a spear, but just because his name was based on the word spear does NOT mean that you can drop the e.
Or does this "evolution" everyone's touting include lopping letters of names, now, too?
I find it funny that the Times article was written by Jennifer 8. Lee -- not l33tspeak and not a typo. It's a Chinese cultural thing that she's written about somewhere. I can't find a primary reference on Google, though.
"An equal opportunity disease afflicts nearly every person now on the Web, from the humblest instant messenger to the multi-million-dollar-salaried heads of corporate giants. Cunning and insidious, the disease goes largely unrecognized because it is based on centuries of convention and grammar-school education. Though these users don't know it yet, 99% of the grammar they type is obsolete."
Read the rest.
---
eeww, I'll have a crab juice.
"There is no official English language," said Jesse Sheidlower, the North American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. "Language is spread not because not anyone dictates any one thing to happen. The decisions are made by the language and the people who use the language."
IN UR FACE, GRAMMER POLICE!
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
Here is my favorite part:
Even terms that cannot be expressed verbally are making their way into papers. Melanie Weaver was stunned by some of the term papers she received from a 10th-grade class she recently taught as part of an internship. "They would be trying to make a point in a paper, they would put a smiley face in the end," said Ms. Weaver, who teaches at Alvernia College in Reading, Pa. "If they were presenting an argument and they needed to present an opposite view, they would put a frown."
--something witty
Does this mean that in bars instead of asking chicks their sign, it'll be "ASL plz".
>I despise replacements for the words "you" and "are" because they're only 3 letters long. RTFM, wb and RABUF are one thing, but 'u' for 'you'? how lazy can you get?!
You can get WAY lazy when you use txt msgs on cellphones. Those tinier-than-a-damn-classic-gameboy screens doesn't help, and being charged by the godamn byte doesn't help either.
i've been "accidentally" doing that since 6th grade. right now i'm a freshman in college... you eventually grow out of it and start speaking normally again :)
see sig. see sig run. run sig run.
Don't blame IRC or IM for this kind of word shortening. This practice is older than computers.
I have no idea how "l33t sp33k" came about, but I've always thought it was, at least partly, to get around the automatic filters on a lot of mail/IM/IRC sites. If the computer can't match it with a disallowed word, then it can get through, and people can still figure out what you meant.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
I don't know where you went to school, but using contractions when you write papers is frowned upon.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
I went to register for the NY time site and knoticed that if you click "Under 13" it takes you straight to the page without reging.
I also forgot : typing text on a cellphone keypad sux0r.
:)- I hate spam!
hate the word "hella"? I don't even know where this came from; it seemed like suddenly right around 1998 everyone I knew was using it. That stupid word needs to be forgotten.
I see a new curriculum forming...
I have typed my... everything since about 8th grade. which, whilst putting me in a horrible disposition for carpel-tunnel syndrom, renders my handwriting completely incomprehensible.
which really sucks. right now, to avoid mistakes on official government (like, say, DMV) forms, I actually have to go out and find a typewriter to type them on (you have no idea how many times i got stuff screwed up from a hand-filled official form). I am dreading the day when some massive solar-flare wipes out the entire civilization's computer resou... [flash -- bzzzzt] Checksum Error
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Mid 90's
Pedophiles welcome the continuing development of the Information Superhighyway.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
looks like we now have E-Bonics
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
The rest of the world doesn't write this way. The teachers will be doing you a disservice if they let you graduate without knowing appropriate communication skills. Many of the undergrads I taught were functionally illiterate.
The tech generation doesn't speak this language, unless they say L-3-3-T a lot. L33T speak is a written shorthand, and a fad that will pass. Remember that it is not historically unprecedented that technology influences language: Telegraphic prose was another technologically influenced writing fad.
You know, I is capitalized and that the apostrophe goes between the n and the t, right?
Tony Blair is planing to level Dublin, and Spain intends to nuke Catalonia. After all, they killed people first!
As for Saddam poisoning his own people; thats called a civil war, son. You don't need to get involved in those. Remember Korea? Vietnam? Look them up.
It's the same as slang. There are cases where you allow it, but
you have to make darn sure they know the difference between that
and standard formal usage. It goes along with teaching them to
cite sources and follow a consistent style (e.g., MLA, but in the
lower grades you start simple by just making them doublespace, then
as the grades go by you add more involved requirements) and avoid
the second person (and, in research work, the first person as well).
It's not that the slang (or the 1337 speak) is wrong _per se_ but
that it is out of place in some contexts, and so students must
learn to avoid it at times.
Journalists learn to write in a style that avoids passive voice
like the plague; researchers use the passive voice as a sort of
tonic to cure the ills of first and second person. Field jargon
is necessary in technical writing but is often better avoided in
writing intended for laypersons. It's all about context. Yes,
schools should of course be teaching students this concept.
Then you have artistic license, wherein it is occasionally useful
to violate deliberately the usual rules of a given context for
effect, but you can't do that effectively until you have mastered
the usual rules. For example, clever use of sarcasm in a formal
research document is an art not easily learned, because it requires
complete mastery of both the subtle nuances of sarcasm and the
formal style of research documentation, as well as an excellent
sense of timing. Pulling it off effectively is neigh unto genius.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Anybody see Jay Leno yesterday. He did a Jaywalking segment where he asked people questions about American History. He asked one TEACHER who said "The British are coming!"? Her answer...the south! He asked her who they told and she said the other side. The North? yes. So, the South ran up to the North yelling the British are coming! Would that not be the funniest thing in the world to see. Might be good strategy, the north would be laughing to hard to fight. Another high school government teacher was asked who arrived first, the pilgrims or Columbus. She made Jay give his answer first, Columbus. She then adamantly told him he was wrong, it was the pilgrims. So the chronology of 13 colonies is that the english pilgrims came and settled, then Columbus became the first englishman to discover America. Apparently the pilgrims were just roque nomads. Straight from the mouth of a government teacher. Those aren't even the worst example, but the worst examples weren't teachers. But basically the future looks dim if these non-english speaking kids are being taught by too many people like the teachers above. Do you think Dubya would mind if I formed my own little country on my land before the current crop of kids gets into office? That's all I need is an official government memorandum reading: A11 UR R1GH7'5 R BL0N6 70 US!
I can see it now:
Note on a students assignment:
"Learn to FSCKING spell!!!1!11!".
Oh, the irony.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Personally, I find that l33t sp33k annoys the crap out of me. It's marginally acceptable in SMS messages, but really doesn't belong anywhere else imo. I don't even use it myself in SMS' because my phone as T9 input and I can type messages in pretty damn quickly. ;) :)
An interesting meme I wanted to throw down is that language is more than just communication, it's a formal way of constructing ideas not only for communication to others, but also in our own minds; Much in the way that mathematics has it's own language for the formulation and transmission of concepts.
If common English starts to lose it's formal structure and we descend into some kind of Taxilinga, I will be worried that the ability to formalise and construct logical thought patterns will be lost to some people (I guess it probably already is lost to people who say 'like' and 'know what I'z sayin' 4 times a sentence
I'm hanging on to Queen's English until the day I die either way
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
You're welcome.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Whenever I'm not turning up the results I'm looking for on a search engine, I start trying spelling variations. If I were looking for:
independent consultants
I would try:
independant consultants
independent consultents
independant consultents
etc.
Or statistical modeling, and statistical modelling (both modeling spellings are OK actually).
Especially on eBay, newsgroups, or when looking for obscure home-grown sites.
Anyone else try this? When will Google automagically try these permutations for me? It already corrects some search terms for me (sometimes incorrectly, like Word).
TTFN...
The important thing about Huck Finn (besides it being a novel) is that Twain knew the difference between a tale told in Huck's voice and a factual essay, and could write in either mode. A student would get no credit from me for breaking a rule of written communication unless he/she both understood the rules and understood when it was okay to break them.
|\/|y |)0g 8 17.
I dream of a day where ppl will speak an unambiguous language.
this sig is deprecated
J35uz Chri57 iz teh 10rd 0f 411.
-516
The long and short is that kids today are too easily learning things before the education system can get to them. There isn't a typing class until high school in most areas. Hell, I see many kids around seven that type 30+ wpm. They learn to read online via chat rooms, websites, and other methods before they are assigned Dick and Jane or Pug. Then, the intelligent children are asked to slow down so those without computers can catch up without feeling embarassment. This is sad, and it is why many Asian and European countries continually kick the US' ass in youth aptitude.
Let the kids that excel do just that. While I think "net speak" should be counted as incorrect English for papers submitted, the knowledge the kid posesses to use the chat rooms, computer, etc., should be commended.
Click here or here.
"What ain't no country I ever heard of! They speak English in What?"
I understand 'cuz,' but what's with the 'wuz'? It's the same amount of letters as 'was', so what's the point?
I blame hooked on phonics.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
In a few years, we'll be holding all the cards. We'll be doing interviews. We'll be evaluating them, who will be our new employees.
I will personally shitcan, with great zeal, anyone who dares to use the letter u as a personal identifier.
Freaking dumbasses. My generation did not and still does not have a clue when it comes to writing, but at least we tried.
is this not evolution in language?
how else can a language advance?
this makes our language shorter and more efficient over time, just like the gradual change from old english to modern english. things that do not work well fall aside like fads, and things that work well are integrated into the standard. Compare language to the linux kernel, good stuff gets integrated into the official, and the bad stuff is just a patch that will fade out of knowledge in time.
secondly, people are visualy learners for the most part. if you read a word spelled correctly 1000 times, you know that is how it is to be spelled, even if you were never taught how to spell it. I read "anonymous" many many times per day, and i know how to spell it, but i have never been taught to spell it. spell chackers dont dumb down kids, they are just a different method of teaching them.
calculators on the other hand. they dont show the process by which they reach their answer, they just spit it out. children should be taught to do fundamental math in school, and taught to be able to do simple mathimatical problems quickly in thier head. calculators should be used when the limits on the common persons memory skills are the barrier. most people cant remember more than 5 or 6 numbers at a time, so if you need to add 25 numbers, you need paper or a calculator, or when the numbers are beyond most people intelegence to calculate, 2.87x964.3 for example, try that in your head.
also remember, the human mind is an extremely powerful computer, capable of doing complete mathimatics very quickly, BUT, the interface with the mind needs to be taught to exploit that power.
We can assume that the high school kids who write this way are the ones who spend the most time on the computer, which are typically the affluent. The affluent typically end up in college and whoa baby are they going to be surprised when their English 101 professor is 60 years old and doesn't give a rats ass about how they do it on the internet. They're are going go get their butts kicked by college English professors. That is why this is problem. So for those of us whose had to actually learn spelling and grammar, and who took typing class in high school on actual typewriters, we can be relieved to know that college professors will set these kids straight.
You have been selected to represent the school at the national grammar rodeo at the Sheraton Hotel in Canada.
All my money went to Nigeria and all I got was this lousy sig. . .
I guess I don't understand why this is so scary new. Slang is slang is slang, whether it comes from dock workers, or black people, or chat rooms. Do a unit on it. Assign an essay that uses as much obtuse chat-room slang as possible. Sometimes you learn a lot about doing things the right way when you do them the wrong way. That could be a lot of fun for both the students and the teachers. Adults have contests to do this in computer code. Use the opportunity to study patois, slang, pidgin, throw in some Twain and Chaucer. It's a rich cultural learning opportunity, not the end of the world.
The slang distinction really shouldn't be a problem. As others have pointed out, many of us grew up (I'm 26) using BBSes and chat rooms, and somehow managed to turn out grammatically and orthographically correct papers. Kids aren't any more stupid or smart today than they were 10, 20 years ago. They can hack the context switches.
[underlying: but! but! but! it's different! its computers, therefore scary. ooo "War Games". whatever. big whoop]
'r' and 'u' do not constitute l33t speak. that's n00b speak. 401 14/\/\3|25. now, if they start writing things in actual l33t speak... hah. right. not a chance. the school system here teachs kids to spell shitty, they used hooked-on-phonics. yes, really.
... of this story is that there are so many posts along thw lines of the kids of today ... when you sitback and realize the forum you have chosen to put your point across is slashdot, not exactly know for it's great adherance to everyday grammer.
whenever i see 'ur' and such drivel the first thing that comes to mind is some anorexic 15 year old bitch who is skanky and puts out for everyone and listend to heavy metal white fucking trash bitch
you misspelled piece.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
No, that's illiteracy. most people with a decent typing speed don't waste brain power on l33tsp33k.
As an aside, how many people who write LOL really laugh out loud? It's spooky how many people will sit there and write lol, or rofl or lmao, and be sitting there stoically(spelling on that last word?).
the thought that l33t sp33k could become the language of the future is rather frightening, but since the masses generally decide the direction of language, we could be witnessing the next evolution of the language.
It's been a long time.
LOL! Geez... I haven't laughed that hard at a /. post since the OOG the caveman days (where da hell is the OOGster anyway?) -- but me with no mods.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
I'm on first name terms with the guy -- he's a Chas.
Chucky Dickens, indeed...hmf!
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Hell, one day a friend of mine spit out some 7-8 character long slew of characters to me. I go "huh?" and then they explained what all the characters meant. I was like "where the hell you hear that?" and they said they just made it up, so I go "how the hell am I supposed to know what you're saying then?". From that point on, I continue continue speaking. It's an insult and a travesty that net chat is at this point.
Magius_AR
My daughter (11 years old, sixth grade) recently had to write an essay. They were to turn in a handwritten rough draft and a final copy. The final copy was, preferably, to be typed.
She wrote the rough draft and I edited it, including marking spelling mistakes even though I knew the word processor would find them. Then I had her type it. When she was finished, I looked over her shoulder and made her fix some formatting mistakes. She printed it out and turned it in.
Afterwords, I got to thinking. Back in the dark ages, when I was in school, papers weren't typed until we were a junior or senior in high school. As a result, even with a rough draft, edit, rewrite cycle, the handwritten papers we turned in were likely to be full of mistakes, but the teacher knew damned sure that we had written them (at least in the applying pen/pencil to paper sense). We typed them on typewriters, so even the typed ones were pretty bad at times (actually, by then *I* had a C64 and used SpeedScript, which I typed in out of Compute! magazine). Except for the rough draft, there was nothing in my daughter's paper that would possibly tell the teacher that she had written (or typed) it. This bothers me a bit.
On another project, for science class, I set up a template for her on Visio and showed her how to type and paste information and pictures into it and adjust the layout. The result was very professional, but, again, a bit too professional and perfect to actually assess her contributions to the project. I'm not sure how this does, or should, affect her grades.
BTW (I've been trying my best to avoid netspeak for this post, but I it was hard), the primary problem with spell checkers (even grammar checkers) is homophones and just plain wrong words. My personal pet peeve is 'loose' for 'lose' and 'looser' for 'loser'. I've seen this crop up way too often in "professional" documentation, such as the rules for a game I was reviewing a few weeks ago.
Before I get blasted for being completely off topic: As elitist as it sounds, I think all written assignments in school should be written and graded based on clearly defined standard English. Besides, you have to really fight your word processor to keep it from flagging l337, r, u, and ur, dont u?
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
Next thing you know they won't teach kids how to start a campfire with 2 sticks in school anymore. Everyone will rely on newfangled inventions like matches and lighters. Then what will happen if a big flood comes and all the lighters and matches wash away????
Think of the children!
- Toby
When going threw school. I was never taught grammer per say I was just told when I was using bad grammer, then they would have me fix it over and over again, untill by change I get it right, or if they gave up and told me what the correct order was. But I was never taught grammer (and I am sure it shows) they never explained to me why words are organized the way they are they just said this is the way for these words. They barly taught me the rules for spelling they just gave me a list of words to memorize for a test. More then anything else a student should learn the rules of grammer and spelling. But they dont do that. So this latest rash of L33t speach is basicly come to show the failure in the teaching systems. Kids dont learn grammer and spelling in schools so the learn it off the streats and the chatrooms. English class is taught once a day every 45 minutes. People are interacting with other people on chat rooms or where ever for far longer then that normally. Except for just failing a person for having bad grammer on the test. Go over it with him explain
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I can't see how this is different than the uproar over Ebonics from a few years ago.
For God's sake, learn how to read and write the language properly! Any teacher who excuses or justifies this should have their license to teach revoked.
We wouldn't want anyone to 'feel diminished' because they weren't allowed to express themselves any way they please, now would we?
Yeah, these kids will feel lots of self-esteem as they stand on line at the welfare office because noone will hire them with their 'l33t sp34k'... Bah!
Actually, there is a useful semantic difference between 'cool' and 'kewl'.
'Cool' is something the speaker approves of. "Kewl" is something the speaker presumes a 12-year-old might approve of.
Example.
"Why would anyone go see that film?"
"Because there are explosions, and explosions are kewl, silly."
"Feh. Whatever. Want me to drop by tonight and bring the tapes I just bought?"
"Yeah, that would be cool."
-- I'm not evil, I'm
He forgot to tell Mrs. Endlove to do the species a favor and get her tubes tied.
Teré #leTkØ K0vÆshA kañNIsßÄ?`OleN KùUllüT £tTÄ KuN KÆNn1sSÄ Lük££ v!E$Tiä sE VØ! NayTtÆÆ $£KAvaLTA JØT£N kAt$Ø YhDÉllÆ $!LMÄLlæ $£ V01 AüTtâa j()S è! GO HOME
(for the humor-impaired: it's mostly in Finnish. just laugh)
my friend gave me shit to no end for at least 30 minutes a few days ago.
we were in lake tahoe, drunk as hell. one of our other friends went up and grabbed some hot blonde broad's ass. when i described it to another (4th) friend, i told him "when i saw him grab her ass, i laughed out loud"
and the getting shit commenced. mind you, i didn't say 'LOL', but I said 'laugh out loud'.
vodka, straight up, thank you!
I know most geeks couldn't get their eyes off the the photo of the girl, but did anybody notice the caption under it?
INGRAINED - Eve Brecker, 15, of Montclair, N.J., uses instant-messaging shorthand unconsciously in essays.
So if they do it unconsciously, it means they do in their sleep or in a coma. If they do it subconsiously, they are performing a learned skill without requiring conscious, cognitive effort. I think somebody was unconscious while writing this article.
Because kids are too stupid and lazy to actually learn how to communicate properly, we should reward them by officially recognizing their slang as a "language?" I think not! Let's not reward ignorance and stupidity. Not only does it not do the child any favors, it doesn't do much for our already maligned education system either.
Instead of letting their children spend all day chatting with their peers on the internet, parents should make them actually spend time STUDYING. Has studying become a lost art form or are kids today really that lazy?
There's a place and time for slang. Hell, I'm guilty of using it myself in informal settings. But there's a difference in chatting with your friends and trying to get your point across in a supposedly professional paper for school or work. If kids are too stupid to realize this, then they deserve the low scores they receive.
Gee, this is a tough solution.. kant grade the paper .. give them an "F", they'll come around. That's what they did when I went to school. Worked for us....
Oh no? Here comes that "But kids are so much more complicated, and need bla bla bla"... whatever? Give an F.
nuff said.
Awesome!
I am currently a university student and in one of the required writing classes (technical writing which teaches you to write memos, source evaluations, other boring technical documents, etc...) some guy tried using 'U' instead of "you" on one of his papers. Needless to say the professor ripped him a new one. The guy's only defense was that he was into chatting online and "that's just how people write on the net!". I mean please. I am as nerdy as the next guy, but you have to be able to write proper english, especially when you do have a spell checker at your disposal.
I suppose this happens with every new slang "dialect" that pops up, but, as a once-and-former teacher, I'd tell my kids they don't get to break the rules until they convince me they know the rules. I might also be tempted to lay on some serious dead-tree reading to yank them away from the keyboard.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
+h4t'5 |\|0+ l337! 'u' 4|\|d 'r'? \/\/h4+?
I have two teen age daughters that have naturally gravitated to this king of language usage. I've tried somewhat sucessfully to make them realized that it may be OK with friends but you don't see that kind of usage in business.
Even so I really wonder if I'm not the dinosaur and shouldn't get on the bandwagon. They will probably win this one in the long run.
Before the advent of computers there was just "shorthand". It was a combination of abbreviations and symbols so that you could write and transcript quickly.
For example (in the version I learned) you used the letter-v for "of" and you used a one-stroke plus sign for "and".
And you know what? You weren't allowed to submit a paper with that kind of shorthand either. And in the future there'll probably be some new kind of shorthand (with holographic swirls or some other crap like that) and that won't be allowed either.
Shorthand is a tool either for the person's use or for quick communication with others. It's not professional and shouldn't be treated as such.
Think of math:
A long, long time ago to take the square root of a number, the correct way of doing this was:
root 12
This was shortened eventually to:
r 12
Notice how similar the r (think of handwriting) looks to the square root symbol today. The neck of the 'r' is simply extended over the contents of which to take the root, for grouping so that:
root(222*422+22) is unnecessary. Shorthand always lives on, just look at the romance languages, and how noone speaks latin anymore. Are they wrong? I don't think so.
It plagues schoolchildren? They obviously don't read Slashdot, or talk to anyone online.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
And "it's" != "its".
Omnes arx vestrum sunt adiuncta nobis.
e.g. i.e. Q.E.D. etc.
What's with these kids?
In word the feature is called AutoText. This is the feature that turns "thier" into "their" as you type. I know some people rant about this being annoying in some cases, but the important aspect of it here is that it is configurable.
All these people need to do is to add the l33t words to their AutoCorrect setup. Have it convert "u" to "you", and "wuz" to "was" and so on. To take it one step further, the teachers could just create a prefab template that contains the most common ones and hand it out. Then you can choose Tools | Templates and Add-Ins... and click Organizer... to bring up a dialog that lets you (among other things) copy AutoText between files. Just copy them to your normal.dot (default template) and you are done.
I am sure other word processors have similar features, someone chime in with the procedures for those if you wish.
Not only does this fix the problem, but the student gets to see the substitutions as they type so they get the reinforcement of what the correct English form is.
is when you misspell "l33t" as "l77t".
The shareholder is always right.
"Begun to penalize them for using the net slang..."
Well, really? I thought l33t and üb3r were already in the OED!
Seriously, this isn't English. It's not appropriate in written assignments. Commonsense check, please.
Once I wrote a swedish essay in leet speach and the teacher like it :)
give me a break.
These teachers are complaining that these kids are actually writing more than any other generation in history and therefore some of the "shortcuts" they are using are appearing in their typing?
Its 3 quarters, one nickel, and three pennies!!!
Freaking dime addict or something!!!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Yes, yes, what almost all men (and some women to be "PC" about it) aspire to be - a cunning linguist. Sorry but it had to be said... :-p
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
I R F41L 3ngl1sh?? Th4t u|\|p0ss1bl3
"Keyboarding" class was a prerequisite class when I was in high school (late 80s, early 90s), at least if you wanted to take any computer-type courses. Oddly, we learned on electric typewriters. Now, I think, they learn via Word.
The teacher already has a formal education and a degree. The kids are inventing a new mode of speech because they're lazy. Ergo, the only lazy idiots in this arrangement are the students.
One cannot just invent a new mode of thought/speech/whatever to avoid work.
The name of the town is Gurnee, not Guernee.
It's a minor typo, but amusing given the context.
Perfect example of tradition restraining new culture.
Innovation comes from the young. Restraint comes from the old.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Students sometimes don't even realize they use the chat room shorthand until it's pointed out to them, because that method of chatting has become second nature to them."
/. learned) that must be adhered to!
If these students are unaware they are making a shortcut then they have been so poorly taught that their teachers should be fired or they are so stupid they should be sterilized and handed brooms.
One time during a white board presentation I accidentally slipped into Graffiti and it has never happened since.
Look no one is learning anything in school. Maybe you are opened up to a new idea but you learn becuase YOU learn, not becuase you are taught. School is about disipline and taxes. The taxes are going to happen anyway. Writing in proper English is a disipline (that I wish the editors of
English uber alles!
This
I'm studying secondary ed for english and have an MA in linguistics and I have no problem with kids using whatever form of language they like, from vapid mall talk to gruff hiphop dialects and abbreviated chat room speech, as long as they understand the reason for different forms of speech.
Speech forms are a function of society, and should by no means ever be considered set in stone or appropriate. If you bring your patent office speech out to the skate park, you're going to get beat, because in this group the accepted form of speech is "lazy." As a more simplified example, try speaking without appreviations for a day...use CAN NOT and AM NOT and WILL NOT. Watch the strange looks you get.
I think the problem here is that kids aren't necessarily realizing the difference, and this is going to get them into trouble in the business/real world. There are some simple adjustments one can make in ones' speech which make it more neutral, and once made it's amazing how one can fit in and avoid a lot of unfortunate situations.
It's the role of the schools to teach students this neutral speech (they'll pick up street languages on their own). It is not the school's job to "break habits" a person picks up to help them exist. If abbreviating "Your" to "Ur" makes a person enjoy writing more, establish a voice and express themselves well, I have no problem with letting them do so -- as long as they can use a neutral form when required to do so (say, in a formal writing assignment).
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I've never typed 'r' or 'u' or any of those other crap shortcuts. To me it's ugly, and painful to see. It's not very difficult to type at a fast enough pace to not need them. The only reason someone couldn't type reasonably fast after using a computer for a few months is if their other hand is occupied in self-gratification.
"Olde English," technically, has absolutely nothing to do with the examples you give. Those are merely now-obscure (or cute, depending on your perspective) variations on the English that modern speakers know.
If you'd like to see what Old English really looks like, you could have a gander at Beowulf . As I'm sure you'll realize very quickly, fluency in Modern English doesn't really help much when trying to read Old English. It may as well be a different language.
Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales , written in Middle English, is usually considered to be one of the earliest English works still available that untrained modern readers have a chance at understanding. It's a bit closer to your "Olde English," but it's still a far cry from the minor spelling variations that you cited. (Did you know that "ye" is merely a pre-18th century spelling of "the," and was pronounced more or less the same way it is today?)
0wr F4th3R, wh0 0wnz h34\/3n, j00 r0x0rs! M4y 4|| 0wr b4s3 s0m3d4y Bl0ng t0 j00! M4y j00 0wn 34rth juss |1|3 j00 0wn h34\/3n. G1v3 us th1s d4y 0wr w4r3z, mp3z, 'n pr0n thr0ugh a ph4t |. 4nd cut us s0m3 sl4ck wh3n w3 4ct lik3 n00b l4m3rz, juss 4s w3 g1v3 n00bz 4 l34rn1n wh3n th3y l4m3 2 us. Pl34s3 d0n't l3t us 0wn s0m3 p00r d00d'z b0x3n wh3n w3'r3 t00 p1ss3d t0 th1nk 4b0ut wh4t's r1ght 4nd wr0ng, 4nd 1f j00 c0uld k33p th3 f3i 0ff 0wr b4ckz, w3'd 'pr3c14t3 1t. F0r j00 0wn 4ll 0wr b0x3n 43v3r 4nd 3v3r, 4m3n!
:)
Now if that's not as incomprehensible as old English, I don't know what is.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Marge: I'll just have a cup of coffee.
Bartender: Beer, it is.
Marge: No, I said "coffee".
Bartender: "Beer"?
Marge: [slowly] Coff-ee.
Bartender: Be-er?
Marge: C -- O --
Bartender: B -- E --
Well looking from the posts it looks like leetspeek annoys a lot of people. The old farts are annoyed even more so.
But does anyone have the insight to ask why they are annoyed? Every time Swarzenneger is on a late night show they make fun of the accent (EVERY TIME). Grammer and spelling police are always present on message boards. Leetspeak is no different.
A human being's ability to survive is based on their ability to function in their environment. So naturally people shun the environment they are least able to function in. Some granny teaching English would shun any sort of abbrieviation of any type, while just down the hall in debate class, kids are learning to write stuff down without vowels in order to keep up with a speech.
Leetspeak was created in part to disguise communications from automated search engines at first, now it is used to make communication faster and more efficient. Both of these things are advantageous to the user and detrimental to those who don't use it. Its this detriment that makes people "annoyed" by leetspeek, or ebonics, or Austrian accents. I would say 75% of school is learning to mitigate the detriment you would otherwise cause society. The knowledge is really secondary to all the other stuff like how to write your heading, where to put the title, cover page/no coverpage, What kind of notebook to use. Whats interesting is that the methodologies of schools don't even match industry today. My chemistry teacher was trying to show us how to use a pipette, and said something like "Everything is automated now with robotics." The pipette was an antiquity. Yet I still have to use one and write my lab on notebook paper, because that's the way its always been done. If I turned something in typeset neatly in a binder I would get a failing grade and perhaps an angry lecture. All because my typewritten report threatens a way of life on whatever level.
I can understand where these students are coming from.
When I was in elementary school, I found a secret decoder wheel in a box of... (checks box on shelf) Lucky Charms. I got so used to using it that I began encoding all my homework without thinking about it. My teachers didn't mind so long as I provided them with a secret decoder wheel of their own.
I was reading about encryption when I was in high school, and I would inadvertently switch into encoded mode, change the binary text to ASCII and write the corresponding binary string of numbers. Boy, was my English teacher mad when I turned in 20-page-long handwritten short essays... especially when I explained that the key was "mrs<omitted>sucks"
Still, the unencoded version used proper spelling and grammar, so there wasn't much she could do about it -- except send me to the principal's office. If these kids want to protect their intellectual property by encoding it (in their case, they're using L33t speak), they should at least adhere to proper grammar and spelling.
</sarcasm>
First things first: People who shortcut words like 'to' into '2' are about five operative brain cells away from going flatline. Letting the fallacy slip into their schoolwork is absolutely ridiculous.
If you use some sort of instant messaging, the next time someone starts feeding 'u' a bunch of gibberish, tell them to stop it when they type IM's or email to you. If they don't stop, stop communicating with them online.
What people are really doing here is trying to save time when typing. Some people cannot type quickly despite extensive practice. Before our written language dissolves into a bunch of phonemes all expressed by single written characters (Hiragana anyone?), what we ought to do is promote the use of typing shortcut programs that automatically expand shortcut typings into complete words. This idea is by no means new, and typing shortcut applications predate 16-bit processors.
In the next version of AIM, AOL should include such a typing expander and the default install should have it turned ON. The problem would be solved -- most o/t ppl would b 2 stupid 2 know how 2 turn it off -- as evidenced by their illiteracy.
I still have teletype (an early, mechanical form of telnet) transcripts from the mid-70's, where my dad was writing to business associates in the US (we were in France at the time).
Abbreviations such as "R" "U" "2" were absolutely commonplace and widely understood at the time.
At 50 bits per second with a 5 bit alphabet and 5+ US$/minute translatic charges (back when a buck was actually WORTH something), this added up to noticeable saving.
I must say that I loved that teletype, even going so far as to manually decode the punch-tape alphabet at about 7 years old, thank god the DMCA wasnt around back then...
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
Remember the big "ebonics" debate a few years ago?
This is the same thing, only this is the Middle/upper class version.
Also Remember when lEET was spelled ELITE and it meant that you were known for being able to procure 0-Day Warez......... Remember how it sucked because you couldn't get onto that ELITE BBS because all the crap you had was a month old....
Ah, the Good ol' days.
Given the communication gap between generations, there is one way to grade such students:
Written at the top of the student's paper, in red ink, is Congratulations, your score for this test is '23r0'.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
So the solution isn't to teach them how to spell, but how to actually type at some speed faster than 15wpm.
I work in tech support (one of many hats) and I've noticed an interesting correlation - newbies young and old don't know how to touch type. Of course, I doubt that many people who long ago learned to type on a manual or electric typewriter haven't long since switched to a computer, in no small part because of how word processing capabilities make the job a whole lot easier.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
It's funny you mention The Lord's Prayer, because someone has actually created a shorter-than-160 chars SMS version, here it is:
Add that to your list and imagine the future scholars who will read it and study it. It does capture the essence of the Lord's Prayer, the same as the others.
I read about this in a newsletter I get, here's a page about it. He also makes a good point about how we shouldn't have to change our behavior for machines, it should be the other way around.
There's another curious thing I've noticed recently in the papers that are posted on the net. Every time a student has several bullet points that support his argument, the last bullet often says "CowboyNeal says so" or something similar mentioning this CowboyNeal. What's up with that?
Who thinks that language has different and appropriate forms for different settings.
School papers of the research type are written with proper english, no contractions and no slang or dialouge. Sentence structure is formal and dry, and often if there is a long way of saying something, the long was is used (i.e So, in conclusion" as compared to "Therefore")
School papers of the creative writing style are written according to to paper and the context. Speech is written as speech, narration is written as proper english, maybe with contractions as appropriate.
Speech, is varried depending on the situation, and it's acceptability arround the present company.
Online talk is delegated into two sections:
1)Serious ideas and posts, written similar to a school paper.
2) Chat and shorthand used for joke posts (like the 1337 Lord's Prayer that was classic), and chats between friends.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Big up the LEX. Word.
SO it's a new issue at school, but hardly a terrible one.
:)" and all the other stupid misspellings.
Teachers have had to deal with slang all the time.
To those of us who basically went through most or all of primary/secondary school without the internet, it makes us ill to see people saying "how R U doing
Dood. Kool. Etc.
But to people who have, perhaps, been chatting online as long as they have been reading and writing, it's a different matter.. to them, it's a much bigger part of their world during the learnign process.
This is probably too late to for anyone to mod up/read but...
I can remember writing my handle (screename) on my Math Homework in the "Name" column. Then my Math teacher began to read it and I quickly grabbed it from him and changed it. That was close =)
mitch
is when people send IM's using proper grammar, punctuation and spelling.
... but so does slang on IM's. A happy medium must be found.
Take Mom in this mock IM.
example...
Kid: wuzup mom, hows it goin... im gr8
Mom: Hi Jalulah, how are you doing? I am fine. Are you doing your homework?
Kid: nah... im just surfin da net
Mom: Well, you know what they say, "If it is not on Google, it does not exist.".
Kid: r u smokin w33d.... p
That just drives me crazy!
The events in the past IM were purely fictional. I do not know of any Jalulah that smokes weed or any Jalulah for that matter.
100% Insightful
J35uz Chri57 iz teh 10rd 0f 411.
What in the world does your Jeezus have to do with Directory Assistance?
http://www.iqtech.com/emrp/sound/opening.wav
Don't you mean a real calculator like the HP-49g (I never liked the TI models much)?
Hey, how'd you know I was lookin' at you if you weren't lookin' at me?
What the fuck's the big deal? You Yanks have already corrupted the language, what with your ass-backwards spelling of words like centre and litre and dropping the "u" from such words as colour and harbour.
..and you fuckers STILL haven't learned a damn thing from 9/11!
Then you have the gall to have the language of the black streetgang legitimized as this Ebonics crap. Ebonics is essentially a euphemism for "we're too lazy to teach our kids to speak and write properly, much less be able to communicate in the proper language they'll need to survive in the market driven world of today".
Next thing you know, all this e-mail/chat/hacker-cracker speak is going to be legitimized as the Language of IT everywhere.
Get with the program, and learn to speak the Queen's English, instead of being out on your own, living by your own redefined standard, just like Microsoft.
American: The Microsoft standard of English.
The word you certanily isn't pronounced you. It's more like "yu". These kinds of totally illogic spellings are omnipresent in the english language. Where is really pronounced "wer". Thier is really pronounced ther. Same for there. Who is really pronounced ho. What is really pronounced wat.
I don't see the point of having a fonetic alphabet at all if you don't make use of it by spelling words as they are pronounced.
About spelling it "u". It isn't entirely faithfull to the pronounciation either. You is pronounced as the name of the letter u, but not as the letter should be pronouced by itself, which is more like a short gruntish "uh". BUT, the word I is already spelled as the name of the letter, not as it is pronounced in words, so why not "u"?
An interesting "fork" of the English language is Charles Ogden's Basic English . Basic English is like a Esperanto for the real world. Ogden wanted to create a small, consistent, non-redundant subset of the English language that would help foreigners quickly adapt to an English-speaking country. His languages contains just 850 English words of use in everyday conversations. He claims that it takes seven years to learn polished English, seven months to learn Esperanto, and only one month to learn Basic English.
I wish someone would do the same for other languages, such as Spanish. I guess you could just translate the Basic English dictionary to Spanish, but that does not address consistent grammatical rules like Ogden's book did when designing Basic English.
cpeterso
On the spelling of you:
There is another famous personal pronoun spelled with a single letter, "I". It is pronouced more like "ai", but that is also the pronounciation of the letter I so it is used. If you can use I, why couldn't you use U?
And it doesn't really have anything to do with typing speed, I type faster than I think... I still don't type as fast as I speak, I know that from trying to type up interviews, but it's certainly more than fast enough to do a normal conversation either way, and I can type properly, when I want to. But I use u for you, r for are, k for ok when chatting online, it's just more common, quite simply.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Using U for You and R for are isn't leet speak, its just ignorant slang.. Now, if they were using 3's for E's and 7's for T's then it would truly be '1337 5p34k.
Does this mean that slashdot editors will start using proper grammar and spelling?
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
I can read most l33t, but could somebody tell me what the word "l33t" actually means?
Though I am not surprised that '1337' speak has entered into the standard vocabulary of school-children, but my major fear is that there will not be any way for it to be corrected. It seems that now teachers are being penalized for teaching correct grammar and sometimes seldom-used words.
To this, I will give the example of the word 'Niggardly'. In Wilmington County (North Carolina) a Elementary teacher was reprimanded by the School, and the County for using the word in a class to describe someone of a thrifty nature, when a child complained that it 'Sounded' like a racial slur. (Story Here).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not standing in the way of linguistic development, but the school systems need to give teachers a chance to help the Students learn their errors, and not penalize them (Instructors) for attempting to further that knowledge. If we prohibit the Instructors from instructing, then where will we be in the coming years?
--TS
Teachers are teaching the students "bossspeak" When I talk/write to the boss, I have to use "bossspeak". The boss does NOT need to learn "geekspeak"! If I cannot communicate in his language, I can be replaced with someone who will!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
There is no issue here. You either do the work corectly, and that means by the school's/teacher's standards, or you get dinged for it.
I used to work for a nursing school. One of the first semester computerized tests raquired that all numerical answers be entered to the first decimal point. The program would not accepts "2" for "2.0". You were either right, or wrong. Period.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Shorthand has been around since before the invention of Morse code, and many of the 'L33t' shortcuts looks awfully like the CW shortcuts.
CUL ES 73,
I remember when I used to spend hours upon hours on IRC, to the point where my "IRC clique" had developed our own version of "l33t speak" called "Hehbonics," mainly due to the focus upon the word "heh" as the centerpoint of the vernacular. "Heh" can mean so many things...it can mean "that's funny," "I'm somewhat amused," "I'm disgusted but in a somewhat non-serious way," etc. It's great.
What I don't understand is this "U" bullshit. Is it that much harder to type "you" for Chrissake? I mean, the "y" "o" and "u" are separated by only the "i" key, for crying out loud. I never understood it. It doesn't look "cool," it looks dumb. All in all, it's kind of along the lines of "potato" and "poh-tot-oh," except I personally find it more pointless and foolish. The same goes for "R" instead o "are." U R GAY! HEE HEE! I mean, it's the same thing -- "a," "r," and "e," are so close together, it doesn't really matter. It just looks dumb.
Of course that's just my opinion, and I could be wrong. I see a difference between abbreviating say "read the fucking manual" to "RTFM" vs. abbreviating "YOU" to "U."
M R DUCKS! M R NOT DUCKS! O S M R. C D E D B D WINGS? O! M R DUCKS! U R G-D! I WILL M T MY NUTSAC!
im getting the feeling i shouldnt end my english paper with "And in conclusion, the main d00d wuz like all ur base are belong to us f00!"
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Is it too much to ask of a student to use complete words and sentences in their homework? Give me break.
I use lots of acronyms and "technical" terms at work, but if I would never turn in a paper using them. We're supposed to be teaching proper English in schools, not whatever kids pass off as language in a chat room.
If you were teaching a class about C++, would you let your students get away with typing in shortcuts for certain key words? Then again, would the compiler? Hey, it might not compile, but it ought to know what they meant, right?
The subject here is the name of the "Burn and get burnt" anti-cd copying campaign being run by the New Zealand recording industry. I, and several other people I know have emailed and written to them expressing our disgust at this continued use of "l33t" abbreviations.
Their reply? "You are right to point out that TXT language appears to be on the increase.
TXT language is an increasingly common way for young people to communicate.
But we have chosen that method of getting across our Burn and Get Burnt
message for a specific reason. It's called 'talking to people in a language
they understand'."
I pondered replying to them, but I could come up with a reply that didn't start with "are you on drugs?"
Why are we so willing to accept sloppy as the new standard? All it shows is the same rampant anti-intellectualism that our schools have been cramming down our throats for years. If blatant stupidity is what we want to encourage in our youth, then count me out.
d00d, U g0t @ F!
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
"Perhaps it should become a requirement to teach kids to touch-type at an earlier age."
It is. That was a fun class. The whole point of that class was to give the teacher as much of a headache as possible. Those of us in the know would leave a surprise on the computer when we left and then teach all the other kids how to do the same.
I was in sixth grade and I had pages of RAM being printed to the screen when I left the classroom on our Apple IIe's. The teacher was bitch though--she deserved it.
People who use 'u' and 'r' are uneducated techno-hicks. Throwbacks from the glory days of AOL and 7 posts per article on USENET.
You know what I say to the 'u' and 'r' imbiciles? FU!
I had a TA in a graduate-level numerical analysis course post this to a solutions page:
"For 1a u can use other methods like lagrange interpolation too and solve the equations by hand. For 2a u have to give the resulting set of equations that represent the spline - obtained by using the method in text or notes. If u have other questions about the solutions to this hw, send me a mail . I'll add the answers to this page or reply you."
Granted, his first language isn't English, but come on! Spell out the word 'you!' It's two more letters!
Alot of the shortened words used in netspeak, and the like have their origination in Radio. In morse code, words were shortened to increase the rate at which they could/can be sent. Rather then sending 4 characters for the word 'your' (-.-- --- ..- .-.) most operators simply sent 'ur' (..- .-.) - which on that particular phrase saves 50% of the amount needed to send the word. Another example being to send the character 'u' for the word 'you'. Other Abvr.s (Called prosigns) are also used to signify complete words and phrases like (.-.-.) for 'End of Message', (...-.-) for End of transmission, and many more (Morse Code Prosigns & Operating Aids.
Just a little bit more history on the subject - really makes one think where alot of the language
originated..
--Tucker Sizemore
W8EMX
I fail to see what the big deal is about teachers grading down misspellings in papers (which is about all this amounts to). I always got an automatic %10 off in my highschool papers when I misspelled words like "their" (never could get the hang of all the stupid "i before e" rules. So if someone misspells "you" as "u", I don't really see the difference.
Perhaps the differece is that the kids are doing this on purpose, but I don't think that matters. It certianly would have been the height of arrogance on my part to declare all i and e combos will be spelled "ie", and then get ticked when the teacher knocked me down for misspelling "neighbor".
Although in general I would agree that proper English is important in formal writing, I have no sympathy for any of these teachers who forced Huckleberry Finn on their students.
Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Someone should lock this story when there are 1337 comments. :p
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
1) Using numbers instead of letters is not a time saving technique. It's complicated and current keyboards make it a 'stretch'. (Those 3,4,5 and 7 keys are waaay off the 'home' row!) Indeed, 'leet' speak is used specifically to set people apart and stand one's turf in an age where being something apart from the establishment is really important. Though, it's so bloody juvenile! It's akin to spray painting walls with your 'tag' and by whatever a tattoo or piercing once denoted before such things became just another dipshit lemming affectation. (Hint: When more than 5% of the population adopt a trend, it slips from 'cool' to 'pathetic' really fast. Might as well wear a fucking Nike swish at this point. --Too bad those tattoos are permanent, eh?) Anyway, 'Leet' speak is about conveying attitude, and means nothing beyond that. Most of it will pass same as all that cute jargon from the fifties, daddio, --and the 1910's, what what?
In any case, I don't think anybody uses 'leet' speak for real anymore anyway. It's turned into a square-ball's old fogey conversation topic, (yes, I'm talking to you). All the original users have moved right the fuck on.
2) Sure, language is whatever written or spoken sequence is good for getting ideas across. So 'U' instead of 'You' is fine. It works. We all get it, so get over it. However, those who use such simplifications exclusively are doing themselves a disservice because. .
3) POWER is the invisible factor here.
Twit-child who honestly doesn't know how to spell 'You', or who doesn't know when or why to capitalize, or who simply doesn't know how to construct words and sentences according to classic spelling and grammatical rules, is quite simply not going to get the respect s/he needs from the professional world in order to gain power in the higher rankings of society.
The fact of the matter is that there are millions of people who, upon receiving any correspondence littered with 'new & improved' spellings, are going to judge the sender ignorant, lazy and kinda slow.
The way things stand today, by knowing how to command written language with power and agility, one will ALWAYS have a much more successful time in dealing with banks, landlords, schools, government and businesses, -and all their fellow humans in any kind of written forum. Despite the logic behind new language validity, the impulse when one sees 'newspeak' is to think, "Fuck you, Loser." --And while you may want that on occassion, (there is power in everything), it's retarded not to be able to switch styles at a moment's notice. Why limit yourself?
So learn your ABC's kids. If not, chances are somebody will do worse than hurt you, (which they'll certainly try to do as well!). --They'll laugh at you with hate while you sink.
Lacking the facility to read and write properly is a one-way ticket to lower-class slavery.
Fantastic Lad
I'm glad i'm not in school anymore - I would be so confused with learning English (most people speak it), Ebonics (so I could talk to minorities), and now 133t(so I could talk to young white kids)! Christ why don't they just start teaching Shorthand again too.
It may just be me but i'm glad my only language classes consisted of English, Spanish, and French - All which were useful in the real world. Although Japanese at the time would have been better.
Ave Molech Setting
"L33t" speak is almost nothing like what they are talking about. "l33t" (or leet/1337, as it's properly called) speak is a (total) substitution of numbers and symbols for English characters (i.e. 'the' is '7|-|3'). 133t speak actually started as a cheating system using basic calculators. Someone would write out the answers on their calculator in this code, then pass it to a friend to let them 'borrow' the calculator, giving them the answer. This somehow caught onto the internet as has been used (and hideously raped) over and over. Now, I don't go around using it everyday, and it's really more of a 'for fun' thing, but it gets a bad rap as it is, and I feel a need to defend it. What the kids are using is what I call 'chat spek' (spek intentionally misspelled to mock the excessive misspellings and shortenings of words in chat). The fact that anyone uses 'chat spek' is appalling itself- given, someone may not have the quick typing skills that others have in most chat rooms, but that still is no excuse. It's worse that they bring it over into forums, and then, even worse, notes passed in school. The occasional misspelled word is expected and forgiven, but using these alternatives are just plain stupid. Really. Because, at least to me, it seems you need to have a lower intellect to use these words. There's not other explanation that I can think of. Now, some things that could be labeled chat speak I have no problem with, as long as they're kept to chat. For instance, 'brb' instead of 'Be Right back', because if you're called away or the phone rings, you don't have time to call it out. Similarily, 'AFAIK' is shorthand for 'as far as I know', because it's easier than typing it out, even for the fastest typers. Though these could be construed as 'chat spek', I just think of them as shortenings because you're not substituting already short words or something like that. 'IMO' is not the same thing as 'b4'. But that's all IMO, 'n e way'.
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/1811_302/72 732951/p1/article.jhtml
The sort of abbreviations mentioned in the article is not 1337 5p33K, it is SMS-style abbreviation.
1337 5p33K 15 5o 0\/3R +|-|3 +0p 1t'5 f|_|n|\|y. 1337 5p33k is not true 1337 5p33k unless it took ten times longer to write than the plain English version. That is entirely the point of 1337 5p33k; it's ridiculous, you can't read it, and it takes ages to write.
SMS-style speak however, evolved to shorten the time spent typing. To the untrained eye, the two systems may look similar. However, one is geek sarcasm, the other is language erosion gone crazy.
I don't think anybody would actually use true 1337 5p33k in a manner that was not sarcasm (and if they did, sarcasm is all they would receive). SMS-style abbreviations are less ricidulous, and so seem (unfortunately) much more acceptable.
I frequent the #costarica (undernet) channel, where as you expect, they would speak spanish. As it turns out, they don't really speak spanish, they speak a mixture of spanish, costarican slang, english, english netspeak and spanish netspeak.
For a english newcommer, it is very hard to understand. Even for a spanish speaker newcommer it might be hard to understand. How the hell did we go from "huevón" to "weon"?
This is also to say that a lot of people (myself included) have stopped using the "beggining" punctuation marks in spanish, i.e. and
I don't know where this will lead the language, I definately don't think it has affected schools yet. I'm just glad I can understand it.
I wonder how this has affected other languages? Specially since to me it looks that english is the dominating net language (until Mandarin or whatever is supposed to take over)
What are the 1337 speak slangs of other languages out there?
cl
(yeah yeah, my spelling sucks)
Reply . . . let's get it over with.
RU486?
Why, yes! Yes I am, best drug on the market.
VHEMT
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
You mean..
--
There grammer and speling is getting werse then it was? No lye? Your kidding! What a compleet shock! And there being penilized for it? Oh how terruble!
--
And, re: the "power" argument... yes, it is about power. If you are too illiterate to understand what the intelligentsia is talking about they will have power over you. You have it 180 degrees wrong. Have a look at this in the past. The Gutenburg bible being a superb example.
America is quickly putting into place an educational system which will be turning out a load of near idiots very soon. Yay for us...
- I am made of meat.
The single letter replacement for words is AOL fagotry. "L337" speak is completely different.
Ex. English: How's it going?
"L337" speak: |-|0w5 1t GoI|\|6?
Amen!
- I am made of meat.
i feel weird not having trolled with this before and i fucking live in lexington
When I mentioned the "power" argument, I wasn't talking about Fantastic Lad's post. I was talking about the argument that it's about teachers having power over kids. That's nonsense.
- I am made of meat.
I had a very bad English teacher in 8th grade, but bad in a different way. The was very stupid. We had to write a research report, and had most of the quarter to do it.
Well, I never did it (8th grade was a bad year for me; I didn't really give a rats ass about a lot of things, for various reasons; I'm sure many fellow geeks can imagine...).
About 3 or 4 weeks before the end of the quarter, she asks me if I handed in this report, because she couldn't find it. I looked her in the eye and told her I did, and she bought it. The next week she handed out our preliminary quarter grades, and I had gotten a 95% or something on this paper I never wrote!
Many people in that class took advantage of her because of her stupidity, or perhaps senility. Her teaching style sucked too; I didn't learn a thing in that class.
I feel kind of bad about it now, but then I didn't care. I never did anything like that again, though. I've almost always done well in writing courses, and now have a few scientific publications(although only one of which I did any real writing, and it wasn't that scientific...)
sudo eat my shorts
There were 8th grade students in my Middle School who could not multiply on paper because they were provided with calculators, as to not slow down the rest of the class
...this is lazy short hand...
While I see your point, I ask you -- can you, a presumably educated sort, calculated square roots on paper? At one point, doing so was considered a normal, required part of a mathematics curriculum. My mother was required to learn how to do this process, and it would have been unthinkable for anyone to not know how to do this at one point. Yet most people are no longer taught this process, and while I could probably figure something out that would work, I don't know exactly what the proper method is.
So you moved an entire section of something from the heads of students into a calculator. Without that calculator, they'd be helpless to do that sort of math.
Granted, multiplication is a lot more common than square roots. However, as devices proliferate more and more, cell phones are *always* with their owner and frequently have calculator functions, and we get close to the dawn of simple subdermal implanted computers, you have to ask yourself -- what, exactly, must be in the brain?
So the students are doing better Huffman on the language -- assigning shorter sequences to commonly used words. Languages warp and mutate. At one point, English didn't have contractions. Few people correct the use of "who" and "whom" any more, or worry about ending a sentence in a preposition.
May we never see th
i have had this problem quite a bit since i have been online since apple+ bbsing days and a very young vms hanger on'er with college kids. when i was young i did it to be cute.
... they probably have a great vocabulary and read excellent. its just someone grabbing a headline.
now its becomes a bad habit / problem from time to time with work. mostly the lack of structured grammar and use of computer slang.
i see it as two problems 1) kids dont have a early bilingual education. obviously kids who had a bilingual education early know how to differenciate between differnt modes of communication.
second is that basic writing courses (especially in college) are so mechanized that they dont address any issues in regards to modernity other than citing webpages.
for instance in college your unlikely to get assistence in a writing lab for a math or formal logic paper. and example of this is that they are going to force you to change phrases such as 'if and only if' to 'if' (at least my experience at uw-madison and tulane, as well as what other people have told me).
our taught english just doesnt have an outlet or way of expressing our different modes of communications.
besides kids that sneak a few 'ppl' or 'omg' codes into their writing arent going to have any problems in the future
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
If you believe that education only boils down to being able to find things, you've fallen prey to one of the Internet-generation fallacies.
Being able to find things is a key skill. Being able to harness technology is a key skill. Being able to operate when that technology is broken, when you don't trust the technology and need to verify its results, or when you need to get something done faster, these are all also important.
Also, having an arsenal of key commands/techniques/etc. ready at hand (ie in memory) isn't going to damage your productivity any. But the inability to recall things if you don't happen to have your search resources or your fancy-tech-gizmo solutions handy might just be a productivity impediment.
Disciplining the mind and memory and making them power tools (instead of lazy kiddie toys) is part of a more general process of making yourself a complete, capable, and valuable member of society and a good person to have handy in a work situation. Being less sharp isn't ever really an asset.
Why is it that the development of the human mind (something we know a lot about now and which has been demonstrated to have huge calculational and mnemonic capabilities) is considered somehow an archaic hobby? Is the mental effort involved really that painful?
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
I'm sorry. Do you go to Lexington High? Does the Store 24 still close at 10pm or whatever ridiculous fucking hour?
I belive that the vernacular is the most important form of a language. Languages are ment to evolve as the population uses them. Spelling is not important, as long as the meaning is properly conveyed. :)
so like omg wtf is rong wit yall? ur so hell bent on rtfm...n3rd5
offtopic: Wow! that's alot of comments! I wouldn't have guessed.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
My policy is that GUIs (like calculators) are a luxury, and not a requirement. In my company, you WILL understand how things work at the most primitive of levels (command line, vi, etc.).
I don't buy this. You can make the policy, and to some degree it's still possible to keep this, but it's doomed to failure. (The sole exception is if you have a troubleshooter, where knowing as much as possible under the hood is helpful, but becoming less and less possible.)
First of all, like it or not, the GUI *is* an alternative tool on most systems. If the GUI is feature complete, who cares if someone needs the GUI? You're hiring them to get the database work done, not to do so with a particular tool.
Second, this policy is semi-inane. If the GUI presents a particular prohibitive issue, then you'd have a reason to ban reliance upon it. If you want to factor that $40K of software in as a minus to her value, then do so. But a flat out, no exceptions policy is silly.
Third, *you* may feel great that you know your command line tools...but at some level, your knowledge breaks down as well. There just isn't any point or any way of completely understanding a field any more. Specialization has become key. You don't "know physics", you know a particular small area of it. A carpenter can make houses with nails, but probably has no idea how to mine, refine, and forge the ore necessary to make the nails. No computer scientist, no network admin, knows everything *down to the metal*.
The point is that factoring in this lack of skills is reasonable, but a flat out ban seems wrong.
May we never see th
I find this comment on the impurity of language quite entertaining, once you factor in your signature.
May we never see th
"and to try to prevent further abuse of the language, have begun penalizing students for using the net slang."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isnt it par for the course to penalize students for using improper english? I use "net slang" all the time when talking to friends over IM. I never tried to hand in an essay with it. Just as how you talk with your friends(or posting on slashdot) is different then how you would speak when giving a presenation or at a job interview. This seems an open and shut case. Student hands in paper full of slang, student gets F. Just because the net is involved doesnt mean ou have to reinvent the rules.
Carly let go all the remaining calculator engineers. No more new models after the current ones.
Stupid CEO.
May we never see th
Are we sure Eve Brecker uses these words unconsciously? I'd like to see that.
People who do things without thinking while they're awake are doing it SUBconsciously.
Big difference.
...these teachers could use a translator to help them. ^^
That is where macros in games, that care to put in a feature like that, are useful. I don't have to type a single thing when I am in danger in a game with macro support. All I do is hit my whatever hotkey I assigned to make certain text, along with certain game variables such as my coordinates, appear to my teammates so they know I am in danger and where I am without requiring me to scramble and type out any long sentences or any "l33t" speak.
I know how to spell for the most part. I can usually spot my mistakes but I can be lazy sometimes in my typing so I just set up word to change certain works from short forms to the proper word. I know its a cheap way out but sometimes sitting at the computer at 5 in the morning typing up a report for school I am to tired and lazy to type properly and use short forms.
Forever live the fighters!
Why should a kid who cannot differentiate between slander/geek and actual English be allowed to finish school? If I was their teacher, I would certainly make sure they knew they were taking a science exam and not chatting online. The first time I saw "imho" in an essay question, I would be mentioning something about too much computer time. I also feel that this so called "l33t" code is the dumbest thing to come of the internet, but that is JUST MY OPINION. Didn't script kiddies spawn that?
teh
Start teaching kids very young, I mean like kindergarden/first grade to type well, and to type fast. Drill the correct encoding of enlish into them before they even start to get into the "IM culture".
No one would use those abriviations if they could type at a resonable rate.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I consistantly use yer for your, you're, and you are, but its perfectly acceptable because I'm a Texan. Now if any of my friends from NY do that, they're just fools.
43v3r 4nd 3v3r^#*)@&$NO CARRIER
I am a 4th year CPSC student. Sure I'm not the best when it comes to writting but I know I have to try. We had a group project (12 people).
One of the emails sent around the team contained things like "UR" which appearently means "Your". Then he wanted to be the final document editor. (It didn't happen.) It took me a few minutes to decipher and I had to ask my brother who unlike me had used IRC what most of the message ment.
If I were their instructor I would feel responsible to give out failing grades.
My brother was marking for in a highschool for a couple of years. He said he was given some advice.
1) You're marking too hard.
2) If they have _any_ sort of pencil/pen markings in the blank they should get at least one mark.
3) If someone should obviously fail give them a mark in the high 30% to low 40%. It's enought to fail them and it doesn't bring the school's average grade down.
chad
I'm for ditching cursive and teaching typing instead. I have never been asked once to submit something in cursive in my four years at college. All my papers have to be typed, but there is an occasional prof who will allow PRINTING. No cursive allowed. Cursive is an art, not a communication tool.
The only people I know that have a hard time printing are my mom and Grandma, yet cursive is still being taught in public schools instead of typing. What a waste.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
Nu Shortcuts in School R 2 Much 4 Teachers
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
EACH September Jacqueline Harding prepares a classroom presentation on the common writing mistakes she sees in her students' work.
Ms. Harding, an eighth-grade English teacher at Viking Middle School in Guernee, Ill., scribbles the words that have plagued generations of schoolchildren across her whiteboard:
Advertisement
There. Their. They're.
Your. You're.
To. Too. Two.
Its. It's.
This September, she has added a new list: u, r, ur, b4, wuz, cuz, 2.
When she asked her students how many of them used shortcuts like these in their writing, Ms. Harding said, she was not surprised when most of them raised their hands. This, after all, is their online lingua franca: English adapted for the spitfire conversational style of Internet instant messaging.
Ms. Harding, who has seen such shortcuts creep into student papers over the last two years, said she gave her students a warning: "If I see this in your assignments, I will take points off."
"Kids should know the difference," said Ms. Harding, who decided to address this issue head-on this year. "They should know where to draw the line between formal writing and conversational writing."
As more and more teenagers socialize online, middle school and high school teachers like Ms. Harding are increasingly seeing a breezy form of Internet English jump from e-mail into schoolwork. To their dismay, teachers say that papers are being written with shortened words, improper capitalization and punctuation, and characters like &, $ and @.
Teachers have deducted points, drawn red circles and tsk-tsked at their classes. Yet the errant forms continue. "It stops being funny after you repeat yourself a couple of times," Ms. Harding said.
But teenagers, whose social life can rely as much these days on text communication as the spoken word, say that they use instant-messaging shorthand without thinking about it. They write to one another as much as they write in school, or more.
"You are so used to abbreviating things, you just start doing it unconsciously on schoolwork and reports and other things," said Eve Brecker, 15, a student at Montclair High School in New Jersey.
Ms. Brecker once handed in a midterm exam riddled with instant-messaging shorthand. "I had an hour to write an essay on Romeo and Juliet," she said. "I just wanted to finish before my time was up. I was writing fast and carelessly. I spelled `you' `u.' " She got a C.
Even terms that cannot be expressed verbally are making their way into papers. Melanie Weaver was stunned by some of the term papers she received from a 10th-grade class she recently taught as part of an internship. "They would be trying to make a point in a paper, they would put a smiley face in the end," said Ms. Weaver, who teaches at Alvernia College in Reading, Pa. "If they were presenting an argument and they needed to present an opposite view, they would put a frown."
As Trisha Fogarty, a sixth-grade teacher at Houlton Southside School in Houlton, Maine, puts it, today's students are "Generation Text."
Almost 60 percent of the online population under age 17 uses instant messaging, according to Nielsen / NetRatings. In addition to cellphone text messaging, Weblogs and e-mail, it has become a popular means of flirting, setting up dates, asking for help with homework and keeping in contact with distant friends. The abbreviations are a natural outgrowth of this rapid-fire style of communication.
"They have a social life that centers around typed communication," said Judith S. Donath, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab who has studied electronic communication. "They have a writing style that has been nurtured in a teenage social milieu."
Some teachers see the creeping abbreviations as part of a continuing assault of technology on formal written English. Others take it more lightly, saying that it is just part of the larger arc of language evolution.
"To them it's not wrong," said Ms. Harding, who is 28. "It's acceptable because it's in their culture. It's hard enough to teach them the art of formal writing. Now we've got to overcome this new instant-messaging language."
Ms. Harding noted that in some cases the shorthand isn't even shorter. "I understand `cuz,' but what's with the `wuz'? It's the same amount of letters as `was,' so what's the point?" she said.
Deborah Bova, who teaches eighth-grade English at Raymond Park Middle School in Indianapolis, thought her eyesight was failing several years ago when she saw the sentence "B4 we perform, ppl have 2 practice" on a student assignment.
"I thought, `My God, what is this?' " Ms. Bova said. "Have they lost their minds?"
The student was summoned to the board to translate the sentence into standard English: "Before we perform, people have to practice." She realized that the students thought she was out of touch. "It was like `Get with it, Bova,' " she said.
Ms. Bova had a student type up a reference list of translations for common instant-messaging expressions. She posted a copy on the bulletin board by her desk and took another one home to use while grading.
Students are sometimes unrepentant.
"They were astonished when I began to point these things out to them," said Henry Assetto, a social studies teacher at Twin Valley High School in Elverson, Pa. "Because I am a history teacher, they did not think a history teacher would be checking up on their grammar or their spelling," said Mr. Assetto, who has been teaching for 34 years.
But Montana Hodgen, 16, another Montclair student, said she was so accustomed to instant-messaging abbreviations that she often read right past them. She proofread a paper last year only to get it returned with the messaging abbreviations circled in red.
"I was so used to reading what my friends wrote to me on Instant Messenger that I didn't even realize that there was something wrong," she said. She said her ability to separate formal and informal English declined the more she used instant messages. "Three years ago, if I had seen that, I would have been `What is that?' "
The spelling checker doesn't always help either, students say. For one, Microsoft Word's squiggly red spell-check lines don't appear beneath single letters and numbers such as u, r, c, 2 and 4. Nor do they catch words which have numbers in them such as "l8r" and "b4" by default.
Teenagers have essentially developed an unconscious "accent" in their typing, Professor Donath said. "They have gotten facile at typing and they are not paying attention."
Teenagers have long pushed the boundaries of spoken language, introducing words that then become passé with adult adoption. Now teenagers are taking charge and pushing the boundaries of written language. For them, expressions like "oic" (oh I see), "nm" (not much), "jk" (just kidding) and "lol" (laughing out loud), "brb" (be right back), "ttyl" (talk to you later) are as standard as conventional English.
"There is no official English language," said Jesse Sheidlower, the North American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. "Language is spread not because not anyone dictates any one thing to happen. The decisions are made by the language and the people who use the language."
Some teachers find the new writing style alarming. "First of all, it's very rude, and it's very careless," said Lois Moran, a middle school English teacher at St. Nicholas School in Jersey City.
"They should be careful to write properly and not to put these little codes in that they are in such a habit of writing to each other," said Ms. Moran, who has lectured her eighth-grade class on such mistakes.
Others say that the instant-messaging style might simply be a fad, something that students will grow out of. Or they see it as an opportunity to teach students about the evolution of language.
"I turn it into a very positive teachable moment for kids in the class," said Erika V. Karres, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who trains student teachers. She shows students how English has evolved since Shakespeare's time. "Imagine Langston Hughes's writing in quick texting instead of `Langston writing,' " she said. "It makes teaching and learning so exciting."
Other teachers encourage students to use messaging shorthand to spark their thinking processes. "When my children are writing first drafts, I don't care how they spell anything, as long as they are writing," said Ms. Fogarty, the sixth-grade teacher from Houlton, Maine. "If this lingo gets their thoughts and ideas onto paper quicker, the more power to them." But during editing and revising, she expects her students to switch to standard English.
Ms. Bova shares the view that instant-messaging language can help free up their creativity. With the help of students, she does not even need the cheat sheet to read the shorthand anymore.
"I think it's a plus," she said. "And I would say that with a + sign."
I remember all the good old days when irc chat was not contorted to be used by retards. I happen to be 17 years old and I am, literally, responsible for creating some of the terms kids use today. It is a perversion of the original idea we online gaming people had- using irc language in common speech. Bottom line is kids developed this language by themselves, for themselves. Using this language is a means to communicate personability to people whom one cannot see up front. In an anonymous, online environment, being capable of CLEARLY communication emotion is important since kids do not (normally) develop the emotional/judgment center of their brains until ages 18-19. This study can be found somewhere on the Harvard website. Development of this language (including faces) was strictly to reduce the ambiguity associated with Internet chat. One side note- MacAddict recently published an email in their published magazine saying something like, "OR IM GONNA HAV 2 CUM OVER THERE AND GET U!" along with various other rants. Do you adults have any idea what "CUM" refers to?!?! my god!!!! Ahhhhhhhhh, I nearly had a heart attack and almost canceled my subscription. The term is incredibly vulgar and is only used as scatological humor. sheesh. The lesson is this: many kids (and others) start to speak this language without understanding its purpose and meaning. Everyone wants to speak like all the "gosu," cool, blah blah starcraft players to fit in. It's a shame peer pressure extends even through the online world. Mr. Kiwi "Rec means sh!t, but that doesn't mean you have to like losing."
What's so bad bout' using chat room talk at school? A couple of my teachers even use it in notes, lol :), i think it's fine as long as it keeps outa essays, et cetera.
Reece,
Chat sucks.
I am so glad that no one on slashdot uses anything like it
will hopefully become extinct, and soon. Some teachers find the new writing style alarming. "First of all, it's very rude, and it's very careless," said Lois Moran, a middle school English teacher at St. Nicholas School in Jersey City.
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
English grades are almost always based on the teacher's personal opinion, which i suppose is onfurtunately the nature of subjectivity.
Last year I wrote a research paper on the importance of encryption in E-Commerce. I recieved a C becuase my teacher felt that encryption wasn't as important as fighting the war on terrorism! At this point I knew not to even bother arguing.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
Hot on the heals of last weeks Are 99.9% of Websites Obsolete? comes a follow up at Digial Web: 99.9% of Proper Grammar Is Obsolete.
you said "obviating"
riget in front of us all...
Language is such a dam way poor way to communicate and there so few words we all understand. Letting "netspeak" in to the classroom seems like a bad idea to me. Here is what Twain had to say on the subject of language...
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
While it's true that a lot of information on the web is misleading, you shouldn't ignore the fact that books do not contain perfectly accurate information either. Knowing how to evaluate primary and secondary sources is a skill that all students need to learn, and the same logic essentially applies to both paper and net-based sources.
...when I chat, I write out my sentences the best I can, including punctuation. That way, proper grammar becomes second nature to me.
But I failed my entrance exam for college English, so I gotta take bonehead English first. Oh, well...
Danish != nationality
last year my English class had 2 do a slideshow on Henry V (play not the king)(Shakespeare) and for fun my group made a l337 version. We mistakenly gave the wrong one to our teacher. There were things like this all though it: (own dialect of 1337 in some places)
|)13 |=|23|\|(|-|135 ! (Die Frenchies die!)
r0x0r'd ur b0x0r5! (Rocked your boxor's! (kicked butt))
Needless to say our teacher though the file was corrupt and gave us an extension! lol
Back when I was 13 (about 8 years ago), I was coming onto the scene of instant message and chat room chatting. I remember how much it would piss me off when I saw people substituting numbers and letters for complet words and strings of words. I would ask them why they did that, and usually they said, "it gets the point across qwicker." Ok, how much quicker is it to type "you" than "u"... to the experienced typist, it's negligable. But obviously, these kids spend hours and hours hovering above the keyboard, but still type with one or two fingers, so for them, yes, it may be faster. So, a possible partial solution for this, would be to actually teach these kids how to type!
When I'm writing stuff online, I use a very different form of "english". I still don't fall into the trap of "u" and "r", because that's just laziness. I *have* been caught using the shorthand "ppl", but that's about it. I once wrote a psychology paper in which I used "ppl" two or three times. I got an A on the paper, the teacher didn't even notice (or care to point out) the shorthand. I didn't notice it until I got it back. Whoops.
In Everquest, I play a cleric. This means I can resurrect (res/rez) other characters. I'm pretty mean about it, though. I will ONLY help them if they can bother to type out "can you res me please?" or something to that effect. "can u rez me plz" is just laziness pure and simple.
I don't like seeing it online, and I would *HATE* to see it as a teacher. I'll have to ask one of my teacher friends if this is really all that common. Hrmm.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
It's a virus. You have to purge the deviations before it's too late!! The IM/L33T speak is infesting your brains!! get rid of it quick!!!
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
I believe that students should be taught a standarized form of English in the classroom. It's simply the best way to ensure effective communication with a wide range of people(assuming they too have learned this standard). That said, I think that the methods and methodologies of American educators need serious rethinking.
I wonder if anyone reading Slashdot remembers the snafu over "Ebonics" from a number of years ago. Sometime in the 90's a school board in Oakland decided that it might be a good idea to recognize African American English(AAE)as a language spoken by a large percentage of its student body, and to educate teachers on how to effectively communicate with students. The Media(tm) had an uproar over it, and assailed them for trying to teach "Ebonics" as a foreign language. Much like Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders was trying to "teach children Masturbation", but I digress. I don't remember much about the incident as a teen, but I do remember the overbearing attitudes of my white peers and neighbors, which seemed to center around something like
"Why can't those damn black kids speak proper english like us?"
Linguistically speaking, AAE is a structurally and intellectually valid language, featuring complex syntax, pronunciation and grammar rules just like any other. I don't have the time or the resources to go into it, so I'll point you here. The truth of the matter is that the culturally and economically elite have been using standardized language to assert their hegemony over society for years, and the same true in America as it was in the initial triangle between Oxford, Cambridge and London. Students in America are teased, ridiculed and insulted for the use of valid dialects in ordinary speech. If you're a white American reader, chances are spectacular that you grew up speaking standard English in the home. Well, how convenient for you. The real point of an English class is not to get students speaking standard English natively or ordinarily, but simply to afford them the ability to use it when necessary (Higher education, job interviews, etc etc). The Oakland schoolboard's original idea was to make it easier for this to occur; teachers would be able to show comparisons between AAE and standard English, and help students learn what they need to change where and when.
Instead our educators(and much of the slashdot readership)assert their supposed superiority by scoffing at the "idiocy" and "childishness" of non standard language features. So while I'm not going to make any claims that l33t is a full featured language, perhaps teachers should try teaching children what it is, why it exists, and how it differs from standard English. Encourage kids to learn and use a standard dialect for specific skills, but don't simply punish them as though their deliberately trying to pollute the language. Sometimes I think gradeschool needs basic linguistics classes just so kids can learn why their English teachers are being such assholes to them.
So there's a distinction between formal English and chatroom English? So what? There's a distinction between the level of English expected in, say, and English essay to a Physics one. Oh, and while we're at it, l33tsp34k isn't the same thing as chatroom English, or merely erratic use of capitalisation in a word. It's replacing letters with numbers, and using certain well-established words, eg: "d00d, j00 r cr4pz0r! 1 pwn j00!" See http://www.gamespy.com/naminator/ for a good example of l33tsp34k in action.
No one seems to be taking the side of linguistic evolution. Why is it less efficient to simply use the letter "u" instead of typing out "you" in written text? When pronounced aloud, both are identical and convey the exact same meaning. When typed, you save 2 keystrokes, and can get the exact same meaning... that's a 66% efficiency increase. Why is that bad?
Granted, substituting numbers or multiple characters for letters doesn't always have these same benefits, but in some cases it might.
This reminds me of a science fiction story I once read... I really wish I could remember the title or author (if anyone knows you would be like a tiny god to me). The story concerned itself with government sponsored change to the written English language, substitution of letters, removal or replacement of silent letters, etc. The great thing was that the story used its own reccomendations as the text progressed... the beginning was in "modern day" written english and as the story progressed (and changes were "introduced to the language" the text began to make use of them. If you started in the middle or at the end of the story you'd have no clue what it meant, but if you started at the beginning and took note of the changes, by the time you reached the end the it was completely natural to read... plus the fact it took something like 45% less space/keystrokes to create.
Simply because the teachers haven't/can't/won't evolve and adapt to a new, in some cases more efficient, form of written communication doesn't mean its wrong. You could argue that the teachers are stopping communicative progress simply because their not comfortable with it, but that wouldn't be anything new, would it?
http://www.geocities.com/mnstr_2000/translate.html
Just say "I don't care!!" What, are you nuts? Just *say* what you *mean*? It'll never happen.
Reminds me of a college textbook in - of all things - media law that constantly and consistently used the phrase "not unlike." We used to make fun of it all the time - after all, we were supposed to be learning about "mass communications," "journalism," "how to speak newspeak." Er...
Anyway, "not unlike" means "like." You can say "That car is not unlike that other car." Or you can say "That car is like that other car." Both say the same thing, one just sounds more like it belongs in a textbook, I suppose.
So yeah, we could say "I *could* *not* care less." (The correct use of the phrase.) Or we could simply say: "I don't care." Me, I prefer simplicity, but I think folks like you and I are in the minority.
Consigned to flames of woe.
Here is a more concrete example of how misused calculators can seriously hinder Math education.
Many of the newer calculators will do arithmatic with fractions. They will tell you that 1/2 + 1/4 = 3/4. Grade five kids who are allowed to use these don't have to worry about finding lowest common denominators and greatest common factors any more.
When they hit grade ten math, and have to work with rational expressions, the just can't tell you that
1/(x+1) + 3/(x+2) = (4x+5)/(x^2+3x+2)
This should be simple stuff for any high school math student, but they don't have a feel for fractions any more.
------- Mark
It's about damned time someone stepped in to take care of this growing epidemic. I try and do my part by getting my friends and family to use proper spelling, atleast, even capitalization, and punctuation, where possible, but at a point where reading someone's work becomes (excuse the pun) literally impossible, something needs to be done. Have you ever sat to read something someone has sent to you, or written to you, and find yourself scratching your head? "Hey. I'm getting my appendix out." "o u r r u" "Er... try... that one again? Maybe?" "wat?" "Nevermind." Some abbreviations I can deal with. LOL, Brb, OMG (sometimes) and so on, but, come on, let's not cheapen any language by taking un-needed shortcuts. It's like speeding down the highway in your car; by the time you're finished, have you *really* saved ANY time at all? I mean, how hard could it be to just hit two more keys on the board? For some reason, when I visualize a person actually typing "hey r u ok??", I see someone struggling to hunt-and-peck to find those two keys. Whatever. Yeah. </RANT>
Informatus Technologicus
First it was Eubonics, now its L337 5P34K
Chat spelling? C'mon! I teach alternative high school and these kids come to us unable to alphabetize, much less spell! The current crop of kids were raised in a curriculum where phonics was ditched for "whole language" reading; memorizing tables in math was scrapped for the new "Chicago Math" and "Math Their Way"; Spelling gave way to "invented spelling." The result is a generation of kids, after being pressed through a fine-mesh sieve of "traditional" education, come to programs such as ours. Our goal here is to hopefully give them some basic skills to function in society, and show them the joys of a dictionary.
... bbl...l8ters sk8ters!
Standardized spelling of the english language is a fairly modern phenomenon, thanks to Daniel Webster. Perhaps the pendulum is swinging back and historians of the future will write journal articles about how 21st century and 18th century writing had much in common.
N
E
Wayz
gtg
What Would Scooby Do?
There is no need for people to speak all l33t0 in todays world.
Once upon a time when we use to connect to the interweb via smoke signals and a damn big fire, and a time where mobile phones didnt have predictive text et al. there was use for non-captitalisation and shorthand words.
Now we have keyboards where it is no more efficient to type "you" than "u". We also have predictive text on mobiles, where it is just as fast to type out stuff properly. Most of my text messages are still within the 160-character boundary even if I type them out old stylee.
We also have the development of voice recognition, and if this starts converting "you" to "u" automagically, I am going to go clinically insane.
Damnit people, it bugs me when I have to decode this ugly pap, but I digress...
So it's unacceptable. How hard is it for teachers to give zeroes until kids clean it up?
Duh.
Thanks for telling me NOW I just finished english 101, and I did not even use contractions outside of class.
They are two distinct words.
Just as French has a singular "you" form
("Tu") and a plural "you" form ("Vous",)
English has the plural "you" and the
singular "Thou".
However, in modern usage, the singular form (Thou)
is never used; only the plural.
The reason is that possession is expressed through a contraction with the word "his" before this convention, possession was expressed in the form, "Bob his book is red." Now we say "Bob's book is red." Don't believe me? Dig up an english professor and ask them to confess the sad truth. And for another, how many regular verbs are there in English? perhaps 10-25%, at the outside?
The USA and Great Britain desperately need to form a language institute to agree on standards and regularization, similar to the one the French have. Otherwise junk it, it's too cumbersome as a language for everyday use.
i a9re3 +H4+ iT 5|-|OUl|) N0t B3 U53|) I|\| t|-|e Cl4$$rO0|\/| 8ut R@+|-|3R 4$ @n 4|\/|u$1n9 t00l Used BY U$ i|\|tER|\|3T L0$eR$.
I found out the leet speak websearch utility... http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/ for all your 53@r5
Hmmm, I have 5 mod pts, its time to metamod, and on top of that I have to meta-metamod? When do I get to read slashdot?
I know it's kinda late, but I just have to say, as a junior in highschool, I've known this for a long time. Personally I rarely use the abreviations, and when typing a paper, definately not. for my notes I may abbreviate, but then again, I did before IM's. In 8th grade one girl in my class turned in a paper with " u's, boi, ur" etc... The only thought that ran through my head was, "the school system has completely collapsed."
well i've never read a page of ulysses so i can't comment on it - after reading portrait of the artist as a young man at school, my next experience of joyce was a couple of years ago where i did actually read the whole of finnegans wake to myself out loud
it was a revelatory experience - i do not pretend to understand even 5% of the book, however once, twice or three times a page perhaps, one 'gets' the word play or the wordful insight, and that can be very funny or profound or usually both - there are passages in the book which are a transcendental experience to read - sorry, that sounds pretentious but i have not had the same experience reading any other book - so in short i strongly recommend it (and i did the book a disservice by suggesting it as some sort of counter punishment in my previous post)
i was led to read finnegans wake after reading marshall mcluhan who was a hugh joyce fan and used many finnegans wake excerpts in his book understanding media to expound upon his own thesis
finally, i've never read jack london however i might check him out on your recommendation - i do however remember a passage in nancy mitford's the pursuit of love concerning uncle matthew (lord alconleigh) who was