u r wrong if you think the dangers of Internetspeak lie only with such elocutions as lol.
A number of intriguing and sometimes troubling language trends are arising from the chitchatternet. On that topic, most people would immediately point to such threats as using u r instead of “you are,” writing ne instead of any, of lol becoming a full word
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Bill Brohaugh
(which it is indeed threatening to do, spelled lawl, though I would have predicted the current spelling pronounced “el-oh-el”), and on and on and on. Troubling, yes, but for the most part these are emailisms, forumisms, chatroomisms, and often bloggisms. Forgive them? Tolerate them? No, but do keep in mind that we are seeing these days more verbal-communication-through-keyboard than we’ve ever seen.
For me, these oftentimes Amateur Hour initialisms and other bizarre “word” forms, despite their garishness, will have less ultimate deteriorative effect than a more subtle misuse I see condoned by the pros on beautifully designed, carefully constructed websites.
On many such websites, users login to a log-in page, when they should “log in.” How do you create tenses of the verb login? I login,
I loginned, I have loginned? How do you conjugate it? I login, you
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login, she logins (or worse yet, logsin)?
Similarly, on many websites, users signup for email newsletters, and generally receive a confirmation of that signup, when they should instead “sign up” (verb) to receive the notification of signup (noun). Manuals instruct you to startup your computer rather than “start up” the machine, to backup files rather than “back up” files. Fillout some forms, while you’re at it. Seems we’re sucking out the spaces between verbs and adverbs, probably because some computer geeks believe we need to add extra space to the infinity of the Internet to make room for all the blogs out there.
And are such usages sneaking out into the rest of the world? Of course they are. Like an instruction I recently saw: “Turnover your badge.” It must be smeared with icing.
Such misuses standout to me, prompting me to standup and speakout against them. Don’t messup or screwup: As verbs, “log in,” “sign up,” “start up,” “back up,” “fill out,” “stand up,” “speak
7i The inability to complete the conjugation technically makes this verb form more than just annoying. It makes it defective. In oh so many ways. See “Can” on page 165 for related ranting.
out, mess/screw up, and others with similar construction are verb phrases of two words each, damnit! . . . oops.