Misapplication

Few things have a tendency to make me angrier than listening to or reading the words of a general populous. Well, perhaps not so much angry as wincing in my soul while facepalming. Following these forms of communication are quite a bit like watching someone attempt to bash a rock open with a scalpel. They do not get very far, and simply ruin the tool. It makes me have to stop and wonder at times; "What is the point?"

Now, I am no grammar Nazi. I've read and written enough typos, and misspoke frequently enough that I hardly notice them unless they are profound. Most of the noticeable mistakes are often from people for whom English is a second, third, or more language. This makes understanding the reason for their mistakes a little more bearable. No, these are not the ones who irk me most. That particular honor goes to commenters, especially those whom prowl the sections of YouTube and various other newsgroup forums.

These people are a special brand of asshole. The sort that should know how to speak, to form a point and express it linguistically through written communication but instead, they take all of that education, all of that experience they've had with just speaking the language, and turn it into a big clusterfuck of cock-in-mouth which reduces the average comment to something as simple and trite as "lol u f@g".

...

Seriously? That is what the summation of natural selection and human development has led us to to this day? Not even one actual word within the post, no punctuation to give a hint of stress on any single syllable, just nothing. The end result of human communication skills is nothing. There's a philosophical point in there somewhere but I'm not done yet. Next we have the oh-so-joyful 13375p34k.

Believe it or not kiddies, at one point in time this writing style had a purpose beyond skirting the edge of decency and swear word filters to call that guy that just capped you in the head a string of insulting epithets. It was, at one time, a primitive form of CAPTCHA, which is a system by which one can determine whether speaking with a human or machine. Being human, we can relatively easy parse out "| 4/\/\ 4 |-||_|/\/\4/|/ |33|/|/g" into "I am a human being" with just a little bit of work. But to a machine, there are no words there. This sort of writing, mind I don't say language because it is still English despite the unusual characters to craft the letters, was also useful for dodging certain words or phrases that may lead to communication intercepts on an automated level. A useful tool for the industrious hacker, but there are far better methods such as encryption that became standard around the same time.

Now the crafted has once again fallen to the caveman. The only people you will ever see actually using this writing style are kids who think it's a thrill to be able to get away with saying 'fuck' over an open channel and adults who are mocking the kids with the same sort of writing and further perpetuating the belief that it's only kids who want to swear and sound big that ever used it.

We're not talking complex quantum mechanics or physics here. We are talking about communicating effectively to make your point known. That is the purpose of communication, after all, and without that purpose we may as well simply grunt at each other.