Life sucks. Okay, that’s not an entirely accurate statement. Occasionally it sucks because you let it, or because your immediate ‘world’ is full of fuckwits carrying out horrifying scenarios every single day. Whether you feel like the walls are closing in on you, or that the area you reside in kind of resembles Nambour (a less than stellar locale) – basically, the common denominator is often plain old you. And you are the only one capable of altering your environment. With that self-masturbatory early-in-the-year reflection out of the way, I want you to know something – unlike the Abbott government, there’s a change that I simply cannot ignore. We’re on a roller-coaster ride of emotion here people. Just like when you open an electricity bill dated post priced-carbon – my irritation level is similarly skyrocketing. Please find for your consideration this extract, from a prominent social media website that I too am a member of:

I can tell you who’s not ‘having a bloody good time’.

Okay so that wasn’t actually one comment chain. None the less, these cherry picked comments are from friends and related entities who have posted these abortive examples of English language comprehension in the last twenty-four hours. There are many great injustices in this world: Margarine, the fact that someone is still willing to pay Kyle and Jackie-O to be on radio somewhere, and an acute failure to grasp standard Year 3 English. These are but three of them. And while the shit in the ‘hit’ radio team is obviously Kyle, you know how the old saying goes: there’s no I in team. Similarly, please allow me to politely inform you that there is a ‘you‘ in ‘you’re’ and you’re fucking up. As a third week university student, I am obviously qualified to make this judgement and share it with you on the internet. The internet is like a digital sink hole – there’s as many written word mistakes on it as there are connections to it. Revelations regarding the number of connections to the internet versus number of ‘sink holes’ on the planet aside, for the people who’ve learnt more than one language in their lives – I salute you. A thousand others are terrible at their only language.

It’s one extra letter people. COME ON!

I talk about technology a lot, but the simple fact is we’ve got less excuses than ever in terms of mishaps. English is not like your mistake from last Friday night. It is language – seemingly regressing through sheer laziness. Our phones and computers are pretty much universally correcting our mistakes for us at this point – hell, Mozilla Firefox is correcting me in US English right now.

This leaves us in a mildly difficult situation. Where does the blame lie for mistakes being made on the daily? Just like I haven’t changed my browser dictionary to something more appropriate, is it sheer laziness leading to the downfall of English? Was your Year 3 teacher a bit average, or were you just not listening in class back then? How much do you hate rhetorical questions? Do you not care for your audiences reading comprehension?

At anyrate, regular ‘Joe Blow’ humans are an imperfect bunch just trying to get by. Even I make grammatical errors here and© there. But if you can understand that ‘your’ is a possessive word and ‘you’re‘ is a combination of two words, then why are you not making sure your shit is right before sending? Despite harbouring some of the worst handwriting seen in this country, I feel as if I am capable of communicating my feelings to people quite succinctly, even if they don’t care.

Kind of like your favourite News Limited publication, I too am able to express myself in primary school grade English whilst utilizing a computer. You should be able to as well. From relationships to e-mail – without proper communication we are nothing!

Not a ‘letter to the editor’, but it was on the front page. COME ON!

If YouTube comments have taught me anything, it’s that we need to neutralize segments of the population get back to basics a bit. Instead of getting your phone to remember something, write notes down! The sheer act of writing helps you to retain your ability to use the language correctly, whilst also enhancing your ability to remember whatever it is that you had to remember! Finding myself sitting in a room full of Apple’s sheep fairly regularly at the moment, I often wonder how the aforementioned remember anything. I even fear the same for regular school kids now.

Saving you a ‘back in my day’ spiel, once upon a time the involvement of IT in a classroom was relatively limited, and things was mostly still written down. When I sit at my computer there are a thousand distractions. Games! Other websites! WONDERS OF THE INTERNET! WE LIVE IN SUCH AN EXCITING TIME! WOW! I also find it difficult to stay focused while reading long sections of black text on the hard whites emitted by today’s LED screens. Possible mild learning disabilities aside, those are the reasons why I use a notepad occasionally.

At the end of the day, this complicated issue is actually quite a simple one. You are the common denominator in all of this. It’s up to you to start using contractions properly. If you still don’t know what they are, look them up! We can enact real change now! Besides, wouldn’t you rather humans from the future read your primitive chicken scratched love letters, rather than have them disappear into the digital ether forever?