I Am The Social Networking Grammar Nazi and Proud of It

A "grammar nazi" is defined as someone who always replies to comments seen on a social networking website that are misspelled or just not gramatically correct. I could honestly say that I am one of the worst to come across. I catch grammar and spelling mistakes in posts at least a few times a day and I usually reply in a very snide or sarcastic way. But there is a reason why there are so many "grammar nazis" on social networking websites today: people forgot how to spell and write a complete sentence.

I know I can be pretty bad on Facebook and Twitter with using abbreviations and acronyms such as "brb" (be right back), "lol" (laughing out loud), and "smh" (shaking my head). These, I feel, are perfectly fine to put on social networking websites; it is almost like a new language is being created as you speak to someone. But at the same time, I almost always write my status updates or tweets with complete sentences containing a capital letter at the beginning and a period, question mark, or exclamation point at the end. Imagine if I wrote my articles like many would write a status update. It would look like this:

omg, ppl these days cant even write a sentnce = its 2 annoyin, u needa lurn 2 write homes...

If you were able to figure out what my above statement said, then you are Internet lingo literate, as I say. There are many more people becoming Internet lingo literate these days. For those of you who are not, the English translation is "Oh my goodness! People these day cannot even write a sentence. It is too annoying. You need to learn how to write brother."

Then again, the above translation is much longer and contains many more characters than my Internet lingo version of it. This would be more important for Twitter users who cannot go above 140 characters in a tweet. The English version would not fit into a tweet, especially with hashtags added to it and if you are going to link it to something else. The problem is that because of all of these social networking websites, more and more people are becoming Internet lingo literate and are ending up conforming to throwing away the laws of the English language for a shorter, easier way to communicate.

That is where the many "grammar nazis" of our social networking websites come from. As annoying as we may be sometimes, we are all trying to accomplish one thing: saving the English language. And at times, we do it just for fun to mess with our friends, but in the end, every "grammar nazi" ends up accomplishing the same thing: almost nothing. It is not as though being called out for a mistake will stop you from making the same one over and over again. Some will even make the mistake on purpose just despite them. If I were to write all my articles in Internet lingo, would you read them? Or would you look at them and call "jibberish" and move on? It seems as though "grammar nazis" are beginning to fade in social networking culture, but now is the time we need them more than ever. We are just trying to get people to write complete sentences and check punctuation, not saving the world...