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"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."
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
I trained myself to type quickly and reasonably accuratly so I could sound like an intelligent person online. Butchering the English language is different from letting it evolve. L33t is slang that has not shown any evidnce of becoming self perpetuated outside of the internet.
I admit I cringe when my relatives who are twice or thrice my age type "how ru doing???/" It just seems wrong for people to talk like that.
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
Shakespeare did not write in Middle English. He wrote in modern English. Many of the words he used are now archaic, but it was modern English.
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!
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