Welcome to Jimbabwe. Like, Zimbabwe, only for me.

Y do u spill so badlie?

I am sick of seeing my peers using their phones and their computer keyboards like they think they’re a court-designated shorthand reporter.

^{One of these is a legitimate form of text, and the other is not.}

Allow me to preface this by saying that I did not finish college. I took my time there and did not use it to the best of my advantage. While I have some college education, the maximum level of completed education I have is high school. Technically I’d rate having gone for my EMT cert and 911 Dispatch certs as ‘higher’, but let’s go with something most people can relate to. Either way, I am not nearly as educated as a large amount of my friends and fellows are, but I still know how to finish a sentence without fitting ‘u r 2 funy’ in there.

Have we as a society become such a grab bag of lazies, do-nothings, and ne’er-type-wells that we’ve come to accept ‘ill c u l8r bb :)’ as an acceptable climax to a conversation that already likely consisted of ‘wut’ ‘r’ and ‘hmu’? I’ll make a few allowances for the world we live in being fast paced and altogether rushed, chance social encounters on the street or in the supermarket forcibly brief and strained because ‘sorry, gotta run, I’ve got to get my chihuahua to her Pilates class’ is ACTUALLY A STATEMENT YOU HAVE THE CHANCE TO HEAR. It’s a dog-eat-dog world and everyone is on the move, go go go.

^{Brb, Zumba!}

Honestly, though, is that really an excuse to type like your baby cousin puked on your phone and you’re accidentally hammering buttons with a Shamwow to try to clean it up?

Take note I’m not bashing on people that don’t know how to spell ‘exponentially’ or ‘vociferous’ or “triskaidekaphobia” because, hell, I had to check Google for the spelling of the last one. There is a huge difference between not knowing how to spell certain words, or mixing up homophones like weather and whether (though this one still manages to piss me off, it’s much more acceptable.), versus CONSCIOUSLY looking like an idiot. I’m talking about a different kind of beast. A special one. The type of person that joins the middle of a heated, 20 entry long Facebook thread about stopping SOPA/PIPA and says ‘yea i ttly tink u shldnt b able 2 stop us w/ inteaersnts from gittin on youtoob an watch toddlirs  anb tiereas’. Some of these people are high school and college graduates. I have friends who finished their college careers and have fancy degrees, and they type like a Lolcat has them at gunpoint.

^{Better change that S to a Z, pronto. I mean, Lol hai!}

If you teleported Charlotte Bronte to the modern day and showed her an average cell phone text conversation, she’d shit in her petticoat, slap it out of your hand, and tell you you were a hodgey-podgey-silly-numpkins and ask you if you were blunkered on the head too many times with a cricketwidget. I assume these are things she would say, but I’m admittedly not up to date on 1800s English.

Normally I’d say “Whatever, type like a ferret, I don’t care, it just makes you look like you’re next in line to star on People’s Court because your boyfriend broke your curling iron, which is more of a pressing issue than the fact he won’t pay you your child support” but there are young, impressionable minds on the internet now. People born in 2001 are eleven years old right now and surfing the web. Horrifying, right?

^{Timmy just found streamable episodes of The O’Reilly Factor.}

That’s a little person! That’s a little person that is getting on the internet (which is hopefully parent-protected because oh god there’s some heinous shit on these tubes) and joining Facebook, or using her iPhone (given to her by her loving, naive parents who think it’s good for a person who has barely seen a glimmer of puberty on the horizon to have a smartphone) and seeing this DRIVEL. That little girl is going to see all her aunts and uncles and extended friends and family that type like the drugs they took every Spring Break are still in their systems. Impressionable children and teens are subjected to this kind of horrible semi-spelling, and because their elders and betters are using it, it’s going to filter down to them.

Some day, the evening news is going to be punctuated by ‘lol c u l8r all hmu tomarrow 4 more!’ and it’s going to be MY generation’s fault. Please. Make the right decision. Type intelligently.