It's not so much the mauling of the language from the folks who visit from all over the world, it's the mauling that occurs from people who supposedly speak English as their native tongue. I'm a bit of an old codger - when I was in grade school email didn't even exist yet, so it's no surprise that I find this so-called "chatspeak" largely indecipherable. I get a few of the better known acryonyms, but full-on shorthand is a little much. The most atrocious thing I've seen so far is the kids who write 5 lines of text without so much as a period. It's okay when you're chatting with your friends on IM, but not so much in a forum where the exchange of ideas rests solely on each party understanding the other. That's tough to do when my brain feels like it's going to implode after reading some of these garbled posts.
I can understand if you're excited about something and typing fast, you're going to get typos - I get them, too, but then again, I know where my backspace button is
. What I don't understand is how some folks can write as if they only possess a third of their keyboard and expect to communicate effectively.
