Liike, Yeahh :-)

I know I sometimes harp on about the way the English Language, our mother tongue, is continually being bastardised and reduced to a shadow of its former erudite self, but sometimes there are things about which I become so incensed and enraged, I feel compelled to put fingers to keyboard once more.  (I also know that I have been depriving you devoted readers of quality, original material to sink your collective teeth into, so that is another incentive).

As you know, unless you have been making your home under a large boulder on a beach in the Southern Indian Ocean, the Internet, mobile phones, Top 40 and rap music, movies and TV, chavs and other social phenomena have been gradually eroding our once-great language away and giving rise to such horrors as Txtspeak, LOLspeak, and such, innit, blud? I now have to report on a new fad in Facebookland that is driving me crazy (this week). Aside, that is, from the large amount of young people who have clearly falsified their date of birth in order to obtain a Facebook account and chat inappropriately to all their other little ten-year-old chums online.

What I am tallkiinggg aboutt is the additionn of exxtra :-) letters to wurdz n their deliberate misspellzing, abreviatin and omission of vowels n rdr 2 lk kewl. I think this must have all started when someone was online that genuinely couldn't spell or type properly. Someone thought it looked cool and copied it. And now, it extends to adding these oh-so-hip effects to their names, and then giving themselves hilarious or silly nicknames and middle names. If I did that, I might be called Jefff Pork-sword Hiickmoot.  And I don't think anyone wants that, now do they?


Why is this necessary, young peeps? Isn't it enough we have to deal with your strange behaviour and predilection for talking arrant bosh every day of the year, as well as your liking for pants that are big enough to house a Vietnamese family hanging halfway down your butt and ear-grommets so huge you could drive a bus through them? There is a whole generation of people with piercings everywhere you can think of and hair that would have been considered outlandish in the 80s (which is saying something) who now work in banks and offices. I was recently at the JobCentre, and the young fella-me-lad that served me ("Col") had an armful of tattoos, piercings in his lower lip, and earplugs through his lobes the like of which I had not seen since the last time I picked up a copy of National Geographic. My sister's personal banker has a nice shirt and tie, a faceful of zits and hair so spiky it looks like Limahl mated with a hedgehog.

I guess I am just an old fuddy-duddy, wanting things to be the way they once were, getting all nostalgic for 'the good old days' and regarding young people with suspicion. I know we gave our parents fits when we were that age. I am not surprised by the fact that teens are rebelling, coming up with their own culture and buzzwords. Nor am I surprised by the fact that most of them obviously don't give a flying f**k who they upset and annoy. I am upset by the fact that this stuff bothers me, when I thought twenty-five years ago that none of it ever would. I thought I was hip. I assumed I still was... I was down with all the latest music and was up-to-date culture-wise. Then one day I heard some noise emanating from a speaker, screamed "Turn that crap off and play something with some words!" and it's been downhill ever since.

Oh well. I've said my bit. Time for my cocoa and slippers.