Education

I am bemused by the number of mouth-breathing illiterates that are proliferating on the Internet—primarily on ‘Facebook’, of course.

“Me and Billy went camping. It was to good. Jimmy didn’t turn up because hes a looser he should of been with us their was lots of food. LMLNO!”

Those of you that have received a basic education that involved the fringes of grammar, punctuation, syntax and comprehension will immediately see that there is a problem with that post on ‘Facebook’ (not a real one, of course).

On the other hand, there are many people out there who will see nothing wrong with that at all!

Sad.

The objective of writing something down is to communicate an idea or thought from one person to another. In order to do that it is necessary to use a common language—one that is understood by the ‘sender’ and the ‘receiver’.

Saying, “Me and my pals all write like that!” is no reason to continue in that vein. Maybe it’s time to look at your ‘pals’ and make a life adjustment. Study your five best friends and then think that you are looking at yourself. This is how you appear to others.

If they are undereducated, slow, dim-witted, they drool a lot and have blank expressions when required to make a decision then, perhaps, it is time to select some new friends because these will never improve your life.

Maybe you believe that your life needs no improvement; maybe it is perfect as it is. It is possible that you have never, ever, had a dream in which you possessed something nice that you bought for yourself with your own money and not something donated or gifted to you from your parents/granny.

No? Never?

Stay where you are. Just stagnate and rot in your own private hellhole in a state of euphoric bliss. Your non-job at MuckDonald’s is safe sine die!

Apart from the proliferation of nonsensical abbreviations—I used one (above) in my pseudo-post, I have to take issue with the ‘hash-tag’ phenomenon.

What is it? I do not understand it. I have no clue as to the purpose of this. In the same way that I deplore the use of SMS-speak for anything other than sending an SMS, I cannot, for the life of me, understand why anyone should wish to use ‘hash-tags’.

If there is something you want to say then say it—in clear, within the post that you have written.

How many people, that have had a serious education, do you see posting things on ‘Facebook’ that are accompanied by ‘hash-tags’?

        SMS speak is sheer laziness. You have a keyboard full of all the necessary letters and punctuation marks in front of you so use them. All of them, if necessary. If you are too bone-idle to write properly then don’t post—save your energy for opening another can of ‘Cowk-uk-Ola’.

The abbreviations I can understand up to a point. The idea of laughing pieces of my body off is a shade unnerving since those particular parts are important to me. ‘Laughing my head off’ is a common, and popular, colloquialism but removing the other end of my lower, rear, torso is less than ideal.

While we are about this tack, let me also denounce the usage of obscenity and profanity.

What you put on your own page is your problem but when it is shared to my timeline I have to consider that there are youngsters and people of a… delicate… disposition reading it. For that reason I am moderately careful of the things I write. I have no problem with offending people who deserve to be offended but innocents are not, in my view, valid ‘collateral damage’.

Insulting someone is easy. Taking the ‘mickey’ out of people is easy – I leave that to the adenoidal mouth-breathing, drooling, mediocrity of the sub-educated herds.

In the words of ITMA et al, “TTFN!”