Social Networking: The Good, the Bad and the Illiterate

Social networking sites have changed the way we communicate to one another as we have been allowed to, in essence, create our own dictionaries. What we write is a personal expression of how we view words and phonetics and sometimes it ends up intelligible, but most of the time we are just taking a shortcut to get out what we want to say.

Below is a list of a few “sore thumbs” of the English language:

Spelling

da = the

der = there

dat = that

knoe, noe, no = know

(to)nite = (to)night

em = them

r = are

gotta = have to

thinkn, walkn, talkn = replacing “ing” with “n”

The number for letters/words epidemic (most prevelent with the high school and younger crowd):

1m g01n 2 da ma11 = I'm going to the mall

h3 l0v35 m3 = he loves me

fr13nd5 4 3va = friends for ever

The lack of punctuation:

im = i'm

dont = don't

r u goin to da store todai i think i will go wit u

One thing I do notice, however, is that most people still use proper capitalization, even if spelling and punctuation are thrown out. I'm not sure what that means, but I'm sure there are first grade teachers out there smiling at the fact that something stuck with us.