Vocabulary

The countdown until the end of the A to Z Challenge is upon me and the light at the end of the long and winding tunnel is growing larger.  Will I do this again next year?  I'll cross that bridge when I get to it but for now we are now on the letter V.

One of my pet peeves or things I despise are people with bad vocabulary.  I'm not talking putting sentences in the right order or even speaking eloquently because God knows I don't do either.  I am talking about two things:

and

Let's start with the Texting/IM/Social Media words.  Now before I write about this I need to put a disclaimer in here:

****DISCLAIMER****  

I have fallen prey and plead guilty to using some of these words, phrases and/or letters....judge not, lest thee be judged thyself.

WTF M I TLKING BOUT?   BTW U NO WUT IM TLKING BOUT.  OMG UR PRBLY DOING IT URSELF EVRY TIME U TXT.  LOL!

I did have to laugh out loud or LOL when I typed that last line, you see I use Firefox as my browser and it is set to auto spell check and out of the 22 "words" almost half are underlined in red.  In other words, they are not recognized in the dictionary or the English language.  You see them everywhere on text messages, instant messages, social media sites, online MMO games and now even musicians are calling themselves by them.

I understand some of them and encourage them because on an email or text message you can't always tell the emotion of the person sending them.  I will accept LOL, LMAO, and in some rare cases WTF.  I will not accept ROFL, because in all my life I have never rolled on the floor laughing and I grew up around some funny ass kids.  As for the rest of them, there is no reason you can't spell out what you are trying to say other than pure laziness.  Let's go over a few of these shall we?

WUT - first, you are only one letter shy of the full four, second, there is no U in WHAT!  Pure laziness.

IDK - alright, somewhat accepted especially in a text, but in an email?  Hell no!  Take the extra three seconds to type out I DON'T KNOW.

BFF - just stop OK?  I have a best friend too but I can also spell out BEST FRIEND FOREVER.

K - this one has absolutely no excuse, especially if you type KK.  Look down at your keyboard, the letter O is just above and slightly diagonal to the letter K, you can type OK.....

TXT - really?  All you did was leave the E out.  DMASS!

AWSUM - you might as well have just typed rad, it only has three letters and means the same.

BTW - by the way, it takes 1.5 seconds to type out the full three words.

OMG -  why even bother?

Those are just a few of the ones I despise.  Now there was a time when I played a MMORPG....gotcha there didn't I?  It means Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.  I played Star Wars Galaxies...go figure huh?  Soon I will be playing Star Wars:  The Old Republic...once I decide it's worth the $15 a month to play.

Yeah..it sucks you in...

These gamers had a whole new language I had to learn and I kept having to ask What? whenever someone threw out a AFK (Away From Keyboard), BBL (Be Back Later),  RL (Real Life), PVP (Player vs. Player) or Noob ( New Player or Rookie).  Don't even get me started on the terminology they use when player either....camping doesn't mean pitching a tent in the woods in a video game and farming doesn't mean planting and harvesting corn.

Then there are the people who mess up words that sound the same...my librarian friends will applaud this one as I know it is their pet peeve as well.

There is a difference between there, they're and their as well as your and you're.  I'll let the following grphics do the explaining for me....and for fuck's sake DON'T use UR.....

See? if there is a chart, then there is proof.

Live it, love it, learn it!

For those who are more to the point.

And if you need a cartoon to help you.