Language under Attack-ack-ack-ack

DSCF0315.jpg, originally uploaded by obscene_pickle.

The internet is changing everything, so it's little surprise that it has crept its way into the English language.

I am a self-confessed language nerd. Sure, there are a lot of things I do not know, but I strive to learn. Apostrophes are my thing. Like a lot of people I spent many years in their presence without understanding the rules governing their use, but now I know. I can't go back.

A misused apostrophe sends shivers of disgust down my spine. They scream to me. It takes all I have not to go around to a dozen or so businesses I see each day with a can of paint and add crooked apostrophes to their signage. At present there's an argument floating around that apostrophes should be abandoned given the confusion they elicit. It fills me with sorrow.

With that in mind, it's still hard for me to take a solid stance one way or the other when I see terms originally designed for efficient, bitesized communication online creep in to everyday speech.

Terms such as LOL and ROFL are all the rage. It's jarring if you're unprepared.

LOL means Laugh out Loud. It has found its way into my lexicon when using online messaging. Not sure why. Seems an appropriate way to show you find a joke funny. He he or funny just doesn't seem to cut it in a world where you have body language, facial expression and tone stripped out of the method. It's reminiscent of my many embarrassing misfires when attempting sarcasm online.

As far as I can tell ROFL - which means Roll on the Floor Laughing and must have been coined by someone so unfunny as to have never witnessed a human reaction to humour - is an escalation of LOL, but seems to be interchangeable these days.

I started using zOMG - an exclamation which grew out of OMG (Oh My God) and added z because that makes it a little more like a pronounceable word and z is the most awesome letter in the alphabet except x - in an ironic fashion, lampooning the practice. It's a slippery slope though.

On one hand I can't suppress irritation that these things are there in the real world, not confined to the electronic ether ("but they're not words!" My brain screams).

On the other, if you jumped back in time one hundred years, my forebears would be saying the same things about me, and the entire world. Just looking at newspapers from a century ago shows that the language is constantly evolving and changing. Every generation bristles at the changes to how it should be, with 'how it should be' dictated by their time of birth.

So maybe I should just chillax. Things are 1337.