Well, I’ve been away for almost a week, stuck on an unexpected contract. I must say that non-disclosure agreements are not as fun as they sound, especially for a blogger who’s just dying to share something this interesting. On signing the contract and the agreement I was subjugated to an IQ test, and while I have much less confidence in them than I used to years ago, I was happy to score 138. So was the client.

Let’s see. In that same week I managed to almost get sued by Beyonce Knowles’ lawyers, I lost a fair bit of my online portfolio due to sheer stupidity (for the first time ever I tried to play it safe – bad idea), I came down with an overdue illness, I got ideas for 200+ domains and some 10 sites, and wrote a research paper on why technology serves as empirical proof to the concept of Post-Modernism. At the same time I’ve ignored e-mail and my blog almost completely.

Apologies for the unforeseen delay, I was forced to combat a cold before resuming the battle with grammar…

In my first post I laid out the basics of what I’ll call the organics of language. I’ve also indicated a possible danger of rendering the English language poor by having most of its speakers use a limited vocabulary. Today I’d like to continue and perhaps conclude both ideas.

Before going further, a “generational” disclaimer should follow. A lot of comments seen these days on blogs that deal with writing extensively are of the type: “stop annoying people with something as dated as spelling rules”, “people have better things to do”, “this is so not from our generation”, “who cares how i write when i im me friends”, etc. There is a sort of stigma attached to grammar and spelling that makes them seem out-of-fashion, not cool. Now, that’s quite important as peer pressure applies in many ways and nobody will willingly make a fool out of himself/herself for the sake of grammar or spelling.

There is a fundamental (and perhaps ethical in this particular case) difference between stating “to jack off the horse” and “[To Jack]: Off the horse!”, or “(…)to Jack, off the horse”. Let’s remember that meaning is organic and whereas context can provide valuable information, it is not always sufficient. On the other hand, adhering to punctuation for its own sake, for the sake of glorification of one of the many style guides, or to simply be the proverbial pain in the arse; well, this approach also has its drawbacks.

Interestingly, both, the use of proper English, and the use of colloquial IM English have changed over the years. In the early days of BBSing, it was considered elite (or l33t) to interchange letters or words with similar numbers or even better, extended ASCII & ANSI characters). Some changes have made their way into common usage, such as ‘2′ for ‘to’, ‘4′ for ‘four’, ‘l8r’ for ‘later’. Certain expressions are reserved for online use only and are not commonly known to off-line users or older generations – here we have ‘lol’, ‘rofl’, ‘lmao’, ‘brb’, etc. I’ve heard a person use ‘lol’ in verbal communication this weekend and I must say that it was hilarious…

Whether you belong to the camp of social activists and would like to see governments subsidizing our homeless citizens or to the crowd that would see the same government enacting laws to clean up our modern streets of annoying beggars, one thing is certain – you do not associate the homeless with the Internet.

Yet here they are, slowly making their move towards the still vastly uncontrolled and liberal domain. Some do it to make a living, others to promote their grassroots ideologies a la mode de early Radio Free Europe (some have even started podcasting). Indeed, the decreased (or in some cases non-existent) costs of Internet access are allowing even the most impoverished of social strata transcend into the digital age.