Eh.. ill just ask tommarow why then. But thanks for the info.

I was getting ready to take up for you a little, but then I kept reading all of your posts. Since you were new to the board I was going to request a little slack since we did not know if you were 6 or 60 years old.

11th grade is old enough to know how to spell and type correctly. I hope that you got the information you were searching for.

Yaa i sometimes type too fast and i dont read over my post at all and i misspell word or i tpye them in the wroung way. But yeah I Found the info I am looking for Thank you.. also Miss.Nunn said that she would have to check up on that why he doesnt keep that web page up to date anymore.

Yup, I think we can tell. ;)

No wonder we refs have it so hard. We'd hope high schoolers knew the rules but at least expect them to know the difference between right and wrong...

But how can they when they can't even spell WRONG. No wonder they always think they're right :)

And I'm not buying the typing too fast... the U is not near the sequence of letters for W-R-O-N-G.

I think now that Miss.Nunn is married you can start calling her Mrs. Nunn.

Taker52,
People are judged by the impressions they give. When you communicate in writing, or by talking, it is a good practice to make sure you are using correct grammar. Like it or not, fair or not, if there are a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes in a piece of writing, some people are going to make negative assumptions about you. You never know, someday you might be looking for a job from someone on this board and they may remember that your posts were difficult to read. Proof reading is a good practice to get into.

Instant messaging will be the death of us
 

If you noticed, a lot (two words) of the spelling in this persons posts were shortcuts that teens use in their instant messaging. It saves them time but will ruin the English language.

I've seen my kids try to do high school level English reports using this style and have spent countless hours refining their grammar, punctuation, spelling and sentence structure. I feel for our future.

Evolve or die!
 

English is a living, breathing, working, evolving language. It is, I believe, the largest language ever to exist on the planet. It is also one of the more daunting languages to learn.

It constantly borrows from other languages to keep up with the world we live in. Words that are one part of speech morph to become another. The formality in our language is being discarded along with other forms of disused formalism in our culture and society. We lament that children are not being taught to call adults Mr. This or Mrs. That, yet we can't decide if we should have one last name, or two with a hyphen, or none at all!

The rising generation are communicating, exploring thoughts and ideas and their world, and just plain chillin' in ways and words and using technologies that didn't exist when we there their age. We may have been groovy or hip or cool or awesome or phat as teens, all terms that our parents certainly felt would be the death of the English language. But it's not just young people on IM that are driving the current evolution.

Have a listen around the office tomorrow. Ask yourself how many terms your industry has contributed to the language. How many of them are jargon, names of things that never existed before or are pure business-speak or techno-babble? Then there is the endless parade of TLAs. English is one of the few (or maybe only) languages that use them. Yet we don't just use them, we embrace them and make them words all on their own.

Twenty years ago people corresponded, now they just shoot emails across the wire. To remain a viable means of communication, English must remain responsive to the changing world we live in, or it must be replaced. It must allow us to communicate at a pace that matches the life we live. For that to happen, it must becoming simpler and less rigid. We're moving into a world where good communication is more valued than proper English.

It's not like English is some kind of poster child for elegant, clean, sensible languages. It's full of bizarre contradictions, anachronistic constructs, strange rules, exceptions to those rules, unusual syntax and grammar and is so complex that a person can dedicate a lifetime to it's study. Where did all of this linguistic cruft come from? From the evolution that has already taken place. And we worry that today's youth will ruin the language?

The point may be moot. In the future "writing" may look very little like it does today. More and more written communication is enhanced, even conducted, with audio, images, animations and other illustrations that add context and meaning. Some of it is already a such an integral part of our culture that here on the board we slap folks around when they make humorously intentioned attacks on others without including a :D.

Plus contemporary English communication often involves an intangible context that is impossible to translate into formal language. Sarcasm, for example, is unique to English, is widespread in our culture and yet finds no definitive expression in the written language. It's much more clearly communicated with a :rolleyes:

Just think, a hundred years from now somebody may find something you wrote today, and it'll read to them like Shakespeare read to you the first time. If they can read it at all.

PS. We already have Old English and Middle English. What will future generations call what we speak today? English 3.0, perhaps? ;)

Re: Evolve or die!
 

I agree with you to a certain point, but too often these days I hear a teen say, "Well, you know what I mean?" and I really have no clue. And it's usually obvious that even other teens listening have no idea. Sometimes, I'm not even sure that the teen who said it knows what he or she means.

Language is just a way of putting thoughts out to be shared. When the thoughts are confused it shows up in the language. When the language is confused or inappropriate or mis-used, the listener doesn't really know what the intentions of the speaker are. This separates us from one another, and prevents society from growing.

This isn't to say we should all go back to the proper English of the 50's. I don't think that. But we do need to be careful that in throwing out the overly-rigid legalisms of the prunes-and-prisms English teachers of the past, we don't also eliminate the useful structure and rules that make communication possible.

Good grief, this is the third or fourth lecture on proper English that I've posted on the board this week. What is going on?!?

Re: Re: Evolve or die!
 

I'm not arguing that it's ideal, only that it's inevitable. Since the sole purpose of language is to communicate, whatever English looks like in 100 years, it will still have all of the necessary structure and rules to do that. And your average teen will still be just as unable to express the jumbled mess of thoughts that they're still trying to sort out ;)

Silicon Snake Oil
 

BITS, I agree quite a bit with what you said. However, an excellent book called Silicon Snake Oil (Clifford Stoll, also wrote The Cuckoo's Egg) claims that we're too technology dependant.

One of it's points was that nobody writes by hand anymore. It's too easy to use e-mail or send an IM. When my generation become grandparents, I think that many of us and our grandchildren will correspond by handwritten notes. How will we be remembered? Will our grandchildren re-read .txt files? Re-watch Quicktime movies? There's personality in writing. Sure video is good too, but with handwriting, you know that considerable time was invested, and that helps to develop the relationship.

Re: Silicon Snake Oil
 

I remember years ago when I was in high school we watched a movie, based on a book, both called "Future Shock." Alvin Toffler, it seems, figured we'd all die or society would disintegrate or some such non-sense if we didn't slow the pace of change. Mr. Stoll may feel we're too dependent on technology today, but that won't change anything any more than Mr. Toffler's concerns did.

There are people I still send letters on paper to, although I very rarely handwrite them. I don't suppose that exchanging written letters will ever really disappear. I enjoy writing, I've even tried my hand at "being a writer." But writing is an inherently "one dimensional" means of communication. Aren't the grandparents always asking you to send pictures along next time?

Although we tend to value it, I suspect the rising generations will not attach the same appreciation for the considerable time it takes to hand-write a good letter. This is all, of course, my opinion :)

Ask any woman how much she loves a handwritten love letter.

Maybe you'd like a picture of us holding some roses? Maybe a video of me saying that "I Love You".

Of course, as time progresses, and technology becomes extinct to watch the video.... anyways you get the idea. Using your eyes to read a letter or look at photographs will never fade; but it is something that should be done more.

Any women out there that can comment? :)

Ronnie Nunn is the Supervisor of Officials for the NBA. He doesn't work games anymore though. I just spent last week in Vegas in a NBA led camp and Ronnie was there teaching. Very straight forward and funny guy. I get the feeling it's not a lot of fun to face him after kicking a call though.