Not sure if I ever posted this, but it I did it will have been years ago.

It's about 4 years old, unfinished, and most likely riddled with juvenile errors and ideas that I no longer hold, but I thought perhaps you may like a read of it.
I'll probably never re-write or finish it but feel free to leave constructive critisism.



SPAM

This is an essay.

On SPAM.

This entire essay is SPAM, actually, but I digress. And I lie. It does have some point, but then again, so does SPAM. It is the stuff of procrastinating, of conversations between idiots with nothing to talk about, of boredom. It is a manifestation of evil thoughts, expressed harmlessly, if annoyingly. And as for my first point: how can you digress when writing about SPAM? It’s SPAM!

Ahem.

Now. What is SPAM, you ask. I’ll tell you. ‘Tis an acronym for Stupid, Pointless, Annoying Messages. And that’s exactly what SPAM is; although, in recent years, it has come to mean anything on the internet which is annoying.
For example: MSN. Another acronym (or initialism), meaning Microsoft Support Network – wow, there’s a lot of acronyms to do with SPAM. Yes, MSN. This is, almost, yet not quite, the most SPAM-tastic SPAM generator available (though it’s not the origin, I’m sure). So, you know what MSN stands for, but what actually is it? An instant messaging service. What’s the problem there, you ask. Well it’s instant. This bypasses the need for correct grammar and spelling, and it’s thought to be more convenient to write in a language which, to a foreigner at least, could barely even be recognised as English. This results in such spellings as ‘hows u?/’, ‘gd’ and ‘y’ (and some more acronyms which I shall mention later). This, apart from being a disgrace to the English language, grammar and punctuation, is bloody annoying, and, occasionally, illegible. At least, it is to those who care about the preservation of their language. But I suppose the culprits don’t really care, and so it is a vicious cycle spiralling downwards.

There are worse things than this though. I know, I know, how can anything be worse? But it can be. It’s the emoticons (emotion icons). Emoticons weren’t bad to begin with, but it got out of hand. Okay, fair enough, you can’t see the person you’re talking to so they send you little pictures to represent their mood so it’s more like a real conversation. Fine. But the fact is, it’s not just that anymore. They’ve spread, and now, and instead of just the little  happy face and  unhappy face, etc., you have flashing ‘hi’s and little Disney Ds, big, glittering hearts and flashing ‘lol’ (I’ll go into that later) animations. The worst thing is that some people have made their shortcuts to be capital letters, meaning that they cannot construct a proper sentence without a splattering of love hearts and stylised lettering. To have to read normal lettering between this onslaught of flashing colours – I can tell you, it’s a nightmare.

Okay, as promised, acronyms. Acronyms can be useful for remembering things, for notation (really, who wants to write out The United Nations Children's Fund every time, instead of just UNICEF?) and, generally, for ease.

But on MSN (oooh – another acronym), they really are overused. They’ve been abused. And no-one even bothers to remember to put the capitals in (the full stop between each letter was phased out long ago, even in formal texts). Not that any of them ever use capitals anyway, except to amplify their point, or, as mentioned above, as shortcuts to their demonic ‘emoticons’. They are even, most probably, oblivious to the fact that what they are using are called acronyms.

Well, they obviously don’t use them to mention charities and the like (well, they may, but I’ve never come across anyone who does). So what do they use? Brace yourself, and I’ll tell you. Lol, brb, g2g, omg, rofl, dp, dw, btw, atm, wubu2 and more. Need an explanation? I did. Well, they stand for laugh out loud, be right back, got to go, oh my God, rolling on the floor laughing, display picture, don’t worry, by the way, at the moment and what’ve you been up to, respectively. It’s complete and utter disgrace to the English language. We may be facing abolition of the capitals for acronyms (initialisms) rule. To tell you the truth, that last one stumped me completely. I almost passed out when I learnt what it meant (okay, overreacting, I know, but I really did feel sick). You can imagine that having conversations littered with these almost nullifies the necessity of words. Even worse, lol is now so dramatically overused that it no longer really means that the person is laughing, and has simply become a space-filler for when they can’t be bothered to think of an answer.

Although, as I said before, acronyms can be useful. For example, if you had to rush away in the middle of a conversation, you could just type ‘brb’ or ‘g2g’ and be off, but really now – the rest is just sheer laziness.

Closely linked to acronyms is the act of skipping letters from the middle of words. Of course, the ordering of letters doesn’t matter, as proved here:

‘Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe.’

Though it’s still nice to be able to see it as English at a glance, rather than this badly-spelled gunk.
But text-speak-users don’t just mix up their letter order, they actually miss letters out to shorten the word. Examples include bk, neva, rly, y and c**. They are even replacing some letters to get the right sounds. English is not phonetic, and shouldn’t be written as so!

Letters, or parts of words, have also been replaced by numbers, such as ‘2’ for to, two or too, and 8 for the syllable ‘ate’ – for example l8 (late) and h8 (hate).