A Word About A Word That Chills Me

Call me a cave dweller; tell me I'm living in the past and need to "get with it." However,when I get text messages typed in complete abbreviation, I feel the urge to respond, "WTF?"

I completely understand a person's need to abbreviate in order to save on all that typing while driving along the interstate. Makes sense. Better to insult me with sloppy verbiage than doing a face plant into that cement barrier separating lanes. Really, I do try to understand the "R" for "are," the "U" for "you," and the LOL for, well, if you have to have that defined, welcome to my cavedom. But must I also embrace the newest form of mangled language that comes by way of intentional misspelling to make one look cool, or in their word, "K-E-W-L?"

Really? "Cool" uses four letters, and to make it easy on the thumbs, one is used twice. I feel that when a person tries to look "cool" by mispelling it, well, that just makes said person look like a "F-E-W-L." Sadly, I've seen this used by people with dual degrees. Perhaps they managed to glide through Masters programs without the need to correctly spell. Or maybe it's only Bachelors and Masters of Arts that decry "Spelling counts!"

I wonder if these misguided spellers suffer a sort of identity crisis? Or could there possibly be a secret society devoted to developing a secret language, you know, a new form of pig-Latin for those who flunked Latin, but made it through law school anyway, and successfully ran for public office?

Yes, I've been called far worse than a cave-dweller, but I am proud to be a word-snob. I hope to make a living out of the proper use of prose in order to propagate better English to the unenlightened who ignore "spell check." So, hell yeah, I get all kinds of queasy when a person, especially those who attended grad school, can not SPELL "COOL," those "FEWLS!"

I'm C-O-O-L with being called the spelling police. Someone has to stand up for correctness. So here's to abbreviation for the sake of brevity and safety; may those too inept and/or lazy to get the simple words correctly spelled have all their texting privileges revoked.

AMEN!