Unfortunately for all of us who grew up with pagers and land lines, text messaging and IM have taken over a large portion of communication in today's world. The fact that we all know lol,ttyl,j/k would suggest that the english language has forever been corupted by laziness. The adverse effects of this form of writing our language is that many individuals learning engliush do so via email, IM, and SMS which results in their knowledge of the language being corrupted. We can all ask that they refrain from using these shorthand words, but as the years go on I feel we are destined to see a decline in the proper written word.

In the SMS world an entire converstion can now occur with only a handful of nonsensical letters arranged to from a message. I am not literate in the SMS language but have seen many examples which have had to be explained. This is happening on the forum as well. It comes downto laziness and cultural indiferrence.

Thank you Terramax for asking these individuals to take a little pride in how they communicate with the rest of us.