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I knew how to speak and write English before I found the Downs. There was this place I went to; what was it called again? That's it: school.
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An interesting point: I also knew how to speak and write before the Downs (though shouldn't we be saying The Barrow Downs?). However, I never went to that place called school. [img]smilies/tongue.gif[/img] (Pardon me whilst I assume an air of irritating smugness.)
This may be an irrelevent tangent, but it is interesting to take into account that the modern English we speak is comprised of many debasements (so to speak) of older, more formal speech. You pick up any novel from centuries gone by, and the text is bound to be more verbose and erudite than 90% of the novels today. Granted, I've not studied etymology to a great extent, but I have noticed what seems like a downward trend in language. Besides a general, overall simplification and resortment to smaller words, many new words that make it into our accepted speech and writing are acronyms such as "snafu" and "radar". So it doesn't surprise me in the least that acronyms such as "Lol", "Rofl", "IMO (or) IMHO", "BTW" et cetera, have caught on so.
I don't mean to say that this trend is not lamentable, but it seems very much like a part of human nature which is likely impossible to change. So those of us who value our rules of spelling, grammar, and linguistic etiquette, can't really stop others from using and abusing it the way they see fit. We can make a few converts, but they'll always outnumber us, it seems. I probably make my own point by using contractions, and modern slang which we've ceased to think of as slang anymore. Send me back in time, and they'd probably be horrified by my uncouth speech.
So one day... People in the future will be lamenting the fact that yngstrs dont jst stck 2 pln 'glsh ne mor.
Pardon me if my knells of doom boom a little too loud for you. I seem to have had a sudden attack of cynicism.
On the other hand, one could go the other way, and say that the alternitive to the constant warping of our language, is to have it stagnate and die. I hear all the time that Latin is a dead language. Perhaps these debasements, colloquialisms, acronyms, and such, keep our speech alive and healthy, in a twisted sort of backward logic.
Eh... It's far too late to start debating with myself, so I'll quit now and leave you to ponder the bizarrerie that is human communication.