Somehow the first thing that pops in to my head to say here is how surprised I was, years ago when I first started reading old postcards, how lousy the command of the language was in many of their writers. The hayday of postcards was roughly 1910 to 1915, and I guess I'd thought, from all those old grammars and notions of strictness in one-room schoolhouses, along with the decrying of the lessening of standards, that people of my grandmother's era would have not only quite practiced handwriting but also refined skills with grammar, punctuation, syntax, etc.
It was a happy surprise, I'd say.
I think we went through a time in which we weren't communicating in writing so much, with phones, say, eclipsing letters, and TV and movies added to books. When I was in high school, after all, it was thought we'd learned to touch type only to be secretaries or to type papers in college faster. So here we are, more of us writing casually and reading each other's written words, and I'm thinking it may just show more, what variously "lettered" people we are.
Not that I don't have my own decryings about the internet & written language. High up there, of all things, is remorse that HTML's cost us the two spaces after the endmark at the end of a sentence. Doesn't matter much most of the time, even with all lowercase letters, but sometimes, even with capitalizing, it mucks it up. Like we live here near the D. B. B. King might have played there many times.
I'm also not happy we're losing "literally"--- to mean, plenty often, its connotatiive opposite "figuratively". But that's not cuz everybody and his cousin is typing in public these days.
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It was a happy surprise, I'd say.
I think we went through a time in which we weren't communicating in writing so much, with phones, say, eclipsing letters, and TV and movies added to books. When I was in high school, after all, it was thought we'd learned to touch type only to be secretaries or to type papers in college faster. So here we are, more of us writing casually and reading each other's written words, and I'm thinking it may just show more, what variously "lettered" people we are.
Not that I don't have my own decryings about the internet & written language. High up there, of all things, is remorse that HTML's cost us the two spaces after the endmark at the end of a sentence. Doesn't matter much most of the time, even with all lowercase letters, but sometimes, even with capitalizing, it mucks it up. Like we live here near the D. B. B. King might have played there many times.
I'm also not happy we're losing "literally"--- to mean, plenty often, its connotatiive opposite "figuratively". But that's not cuz everybody and his cousin is typing in public these days.