,,Wut evar hapenned too speling and grammer,,

I am the son of a speech communication professor and an elementary school teacher, so I was well-versed in spelling, grammar, and punctuation growing up. I'm also something of a perfectionist. I tend to notice a lot of typos and misspellings that go unnoticed by many, although I'm not immune to making those kinds of mistakes myself. I can proofread a blog entry five or six times before I post it, and the tenth time I read it, I find a typo or a missing word or something. (Of course, this post will lead to open season being declared on every typo in here, I'm sure.) So while I often notice the little mistakes that are made in writing, they don't bother me all that much (except for my own typos, which drive me insane).

What bothers me--a lot--is the unbelievable inability by many people to even come close to grasping the written English language.

I am Facebook friends with a few local kids, most of them around middle school age. (No need to call the police. I know them and their parents through the neighborhood and local youth athletics, and the Mrs. is Facebook friends with them, too.) They're great kids, but most of them wouldn't know a punctuation mark if it slapped them in the face. It drives me absolutely NUTS to read some of their Facebook statuses. They string together three or four independent thoughts with absolutely no use of periods, commas, exclamation points, or question marks. Most of the time, I know what they're saying, but there are times I have to read a post out loud, slowly, and repeatedly, trying to figure out where one thought ends and another begins.

Then their friends get on there and respond to a status update, usually using equally horrible spelling and grammar with absolutely no use--or improper use--of punctuation. It's especially comical when one of them starts complaining about how school "suck's" and that they never learn anything there, and then several schoolmates add their own comments, all of them demonstrating how paying a bit more attention during Language Arts might be beneficial to them.

One Facebook status that had me in stitches was (and I'm not joking):

I just now finished my finall copy for language.

But they're just kids. Complaining about school is what you do when you're a kid, and Facebook is just informal communication (jeez, I HOPE these kids write better for school assignments!).

The failure to grasp the written language, however, extends well beyond kids. I was reading an article the other day about Syracuse wide receiver Mike Williams leaving the team--and possibly college--unexpectedly. Williams apparently initially posted this on his Facebook page:

I HATE COLLEGE I CANT SEE ME DOING THIS FOR LONG……..HINT HINT.-0 LMAO

Okay, he missed the period after "college" and didn't use an apostrophe in "cant," but overall, it's not bad.

Then he followed it up with:

Everyone Im staying in school to get my degree sorry for the faulse information every one getting.

I'm starting to think that maybe I don't want my kids going to Syracuse.

It's better than what UCLA "student-athletes" can cobble together, though. Here's the handiwork of a freshman wide receiver there named Randall Carroll, who posted this on his Twitter account:

oregon, stanford, and cal should have been easy wins ,, but shyt thys nigga norm chow dnt be trustin us ,, so it is what it is

Everything's going fine until the double commas. In between the double commas, however, is a bowl of alphabet soup that someone dropped on the floor. Maybe double commas are like those flashing orange lights you see in construction zones, warning that everything in between those lights is a disaster area. Same goes for everything in between double commas.

Then, in this article about Oklahoma State wide receiver Dez Bryant losing his last appeal to be reinstated after lying to the NCAA, there was this hilarious exchange of comments between readers "Mr Common Sense" and "Johnny":

89. Posted by Mr Common Sense Thu Oct 29 9:41am EDT
Now listen, you Oklahomo morons. Get off the NCAA and the BCS. The only real Big 12 team is Texas and Texas is also the only quality university in the BIg 12. While University Of Texas researchers work real science breakthroughs...etc, you morons from Oklohomo Universities can figure how to run your tractors on chicken pope.

Yes, I know that "Oklahomo" is spelled that way on purpose. I didn't realize that chickens had a Pope, though. A few more posts go by, and then Johnny comes up with this little slice of heaven:

93. Posted by Johnny Thu Oct 29 10:20am EDT
Mr como sense is really full of chicken s.hit "We will get University of Texas to..." Since when did you respresent UT to buy penny, again thinking small. And who is we.. You have no business brain, and don't know how business venture is setup, only people like you using brains between butt would think that. I'm glad that your comments show how stupid you are. Wow luckly in Oklahoma we don't have such a stupid people saying stupid things on behalf of their universities.

As a graduate of Texas A&M University, I found extra humor in supporters of rival Big 12 schools being incapable of forming coherent thoughts. I found the last two sentences of Johnny's post, in particular, to be especially side-splitting.

Okay, okay. Enough of picking on athletes and the people who comment on them. Surely members of Congress are better, right? Especially five-term senators, like Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley?

Maybe not.

Here's a beauty from his Twitter page back in June:

Pres Obama you got nerve while u sightseeing in Paris to tell us"time to deliver" on health care. We still on skedul/even workinWKEND.

Huh?

When did this happen? When did we, as a society, stop caring? When did sounding like a complete moron become acceptable?

More importantly, how do we fix this?