The Decline and Fall of Grammar and Spelling on the Internet

It’s something most of us loathe, but is essential in this modern world. Some people forget to do it, others just flat out refuse to participate. No, it’s not taxes; it’s those things called grammar and spelling. For years the social mind has been slowly eroding grammar and spelling’s grip on the world and has now reached a point where it has become almost irrelevant, and the youth of America are actually forgetting how to do it. The cause? The rise of the internet. Without the internet, spellar (which I will now refer to spelling and grammar as) would still be in a very strong state. But, instant messaging, email, and the need for quick communication have upset spellar’s power in the world. Sometime in the near future, spellar may even cease to exist.

But how did it all come to this? How did spellar end up in the sorry state it is? Well, it all started on a single piece of paper in 1961. A one Leonard Kleinrock wrote a paper on packet switching, an essential part on making the internet work.  DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) developed the first working model of an internet, using it to share research materials between universities and defense research facilities. It was called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency NETwork). A few years later in 1972, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf invented the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the means of which data moves across the internet. Tim Berners-Lee made a standard way to program in HTML, the language of the internet soon after. After the standardization of HTML, the internet boomed in the 1990s. This was all well and good. Email was invented in 1969 in the ARPANET network, and allowed fast communication between two or more people over the internet.

Then, the beginning of the end came in the form on Instant Messaging in 1997. AOL made it’s AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), that still remains king today. Instant Messaging offered a new form of communication, one in real time, like a telephone conversation. The need for speed in these conversations gave birth to new acronyms and abbreviations for words, like lol (laugh out loud) and brb (be right back). As Instant Messaging got incorporated into multiplayer gaming, new words came to light, like noob (a combination of newbie and boob) and pwned (owned, but with a p because people pushed p instead of o on the keyboard). These words then spread to normal English language. Periods on Instant Messaging became obsolete, and certain letters were shaved off words to make them shorter and easier to type. Numbers replaced certain sounds, and capitalization became useless. Grammar was not even existent. This was all fine, until people got so used to typing in this new slang writing that it spilled over to other things. Emails were no longer formal and were filled with abbreviations, acronyms, and grammar mistakes. Status updates, tweets, blog posts, and other things on the internet are just black holes of spellar. Now, it’s even spilling over to real life. Signs like “Car Stereo’s” (why is there an apostrophe, I have no idea) and emails like “Want to a house here” fill our world every day, and make thousands of people cringe at it’s stupidity. Another factor to this bad spellar is the fact that people have just stopped reading. Why, I have no idea, but most people just flat out don’t read anymore. Without being exposed to any form of proper spellar, they just automatically write in this IM slang. Spellar will someday collapse under the pressure of the internet and IM slang. I just hope it’s not soon, because the world will be a very annoying place once it does collapse.

For more amusing grammar mistakes, check out the Grammar Police. Thank you WikiAnswers for your comprehensive history of the formation of the internet.