I love words.  From a very young age I’ve always had this love affair with the English language.  My dad encouraged this a lot and I remember sitting alongside him with a dictionary in hand trying to catch him out on the meanings of words.  This game also brought a lot of words I didn’t recognise (and at such a young age probably shouldn’t have been able to say) and it turned into something more than just trying to find something he didn’t know!  I think it’s down to him that I love words so much.

This small anecdote brings me to the topic at hand.  While growing up – at home and at school – we were taught how to say and spell words in every day use, along with the odd word that wasn’t so prolifically used.  I know the schools my children go to still do spellings and reading, so I’m fairly confident that other schools both nationally and internationally do as well.  So, can someone please tell me when people stopped being able to speak properly?

I was listening to an interview on TV this morning and, I swear, every second word out of this particular girl’s mouth was “literally”.  She “literally learned to be a florist”, she “literally had to adapt to being in prison” and about fifteen other sentences starting with “literally” in between.  And, while I’m sure she had an interesting story to tell, all I could think about was sending her a dictionary with the word “literally” highlighted and lists of the correct usage of it; and maybe a thesaurus too so she could learn other words with similar meanings!  That may make me a word nazi and I’m not saying that my grammar and punctuation and even word usage is  100% perfect, but it was irritating.  Still,  her over-use of a word doesn’t bug me half as much as hearing textspeak used vocally!

I understand the point of textspeak – when you’re faced with a limited amount of characters and you need to get a message across, it makes sense to abbreviate some words but I don’t think that excuse is acceptable when you have a full keyboard in front of you or are actually using your mouth to speak with!  I don’t know if anyone else out there has experienced this but when my 16-year-old stepson actually stood there and said “LOL”… (yes, out loud!) I really did do a double-take, followed by the disbelieving “please tell me you did not  just say ‘LOL’!”  He regularly says that, OMG, ROFL and others which I’m desperately trying to blank out of my head.

I need someone to tell me I’m not alone in my distaste for the way people are bastardising the English language.  Oh, I know (before anyone comes in with it) that the way we speak now would be viewed as wrong by people from earlier times (even 50 or 60 years ago) but I’m sure we still use words that actually are words and not constant abbreviations.  Is this what we have to look forward to?  Words having five letters or less?  I shudder to think how this blog post could have looked if written by someone who uses textspeak constantly.  Are we witnessing the death of language or the evolution of a  new version of the English language?