Why don't you "MySpace" it to me?

Ha! I actually said that today. It made me laugh. "Yeah! I'll MySpace it to you!" I said. Wow. What a thing this world has come to. The funniest thing to me is that email has almost become irrelevant. What people do now is message each other on MySpace, Facebook, or they just text.

Which brings me to my other point of annoyance: chatspeak. Now, for those of you who might not be as nerdy as me, "chatspeak" is typing like this: "i luv u so much!" or "how r u?" etc., etc., etc. It's annoying, unnecessary, and sloppy. It is my biggest pet peeve ever. The public school system is lacking enough already, you don't need to help your own declination into stupidity with chatspeak and poor grammar.

Now, taking into consideration where the the whole "chatspeak" thing came up in the texting world (that's right, I didn't include the WWW, that's something different all together) was due to the character limits. Who really wants to send a text three characters over to a "not-your-network" person and get charged for an extra text with three extra characters in it? Not me. But also not the point. Sure sometimes I can see it, but I'm just asking, why? Why do we really have to type or text like that?

I'm sure you've heard all the stuff about the schools and the essays and yadda, yadda? Students are writing essays filled with chatspeak! How tacky and lame! Come ON you guys, we are SO much cooler/better/awesomer than that. Typing is really a lot faster if you dont't use chatspeak, to be perfectly honest.

On MySpace even Tom, good ol' Tom, uses poor grammar and the occasional chatspeak in his bulletins to the whole site. Why?! It's so aggravating, really. I mean, the shift key is right there. Learn to type, learn to spell, and learn how to use punctuation please for the love of all things literate!

Sure I'll slip in a "ily" here and there, but for goodness sakes not as a carved in stone habit. In this day and age we are surrounded by technology. People would rather blog than journal, text than call, and "MySpace message" than email. How funny we humans are. Do people even know what paper is anymore? Journals? Pens with ink in them? Crazy, crazy stuff. It makes me laugh, giggle, and on occasion, scoff. I'm sorry, I just can't help it. I mean, sure, technology has brought us so many amazing things: Apple Macs, iPods, cell phones, just to name a few, but why must we be so silly about how we use it? Why let our standards slip from one medium to the next? If you were writing a card to your great-grandma would you write: "Hi Gma, I luv u tonz. Hope u r good. Its sunny now, is it sunny there 2. Have fun w/all the stuff ur doing, write soon. Luv, ____"? I didn't think so! She wouldn't be able to read it, it's painful!

One last thing before I end this; their, they're, there. It's, its. Your, you're. Our, are. To, too, two. Learn the difference. You look really silly when you can't use these words correctly.

Okay, I'm all done for now. But if you have a moment, vote for Blake on "American Idol", he loves you, so why don't we all show him some love too?

Peace + LOVE,
Mallory

*Disclaimer*: Yes, the "letter" was spelled, punctuated, and chatspeak-i-fied on purpose, particularly the "its". It's a common error I spot. The end.