All the young duds
I have a controversial theory about why social media is full of bad spelling, terrible grammar and awful photography. It’s because the loudest voices on social media win, and the people with the loudest voices are those who were the cool kids at school. And they never learned how to write or spell properly. Because they were too cool for school.
When I was at school in the 1980s I was obsessed with my ZX Spectrum. I loved the games, and me and a few, geeky, friends would exchange tapes. Computers were definitely not cool back then. The cool kids at school (not me) didn’t do computers or games. Like reading, it implied sitting in a room on your own, nothing a cool kid would ever do. Arcade games were the exception as they were in a social, public situation – an arcade – so they were fairly cool, and I used to hang out at those too.
Nowadays, technology isn’t cool or uncool, it just is. It’s an accepted part of our lives and we don’t even think about it, especially those who are born into it.
But when social media first emerged, I sometimes thought, will the formerly cool kids at school embrace it or reject it? Will social media be deemed too geeky for the kids at school in the 1980s who smoked in the smokers room, got drunk, never studied, never read and thought they were so cool? After all, social media involved writing, reading, taking photos, uploading, passwords, I mean what a faff; it almost sounds like hard work. Like school. I’m not taking the piss out of the cool kids, but as mentioned on this blog many years ago, some boasted to me even in their 30s they had never read a book in their lives. They came out of school with few GCSEs, spent years on the dole or got jobs doing manual labour. Even to me social media seemed like a lot of work and mostly a pointless waste of time.
I was completely wrong about the cool, and usually loud, kids as regards technology. They went seamlessly from being loud in school to loud on social media, albeit with hideous spelling and grammar mistakes, and atrocious photography skills. But they don’t care, they’re still too cool for school.
In fact, there is a theory that bad spelling and grammar imply a coolness, a “I’m not sticking to the rules” and “I’m in such a rush as I’m so busy and popular I don’t have time to correct such petty things as spelling mistakes”. One infamous person who seemed to excel at this was Jeffrey Epstein, whose spelling and grammar were actually a lot worse than my ex-school mates. As Town and Country mention in an article entitled Are They Too Rich to Spell?, considering he gave financial advice to the rich and famous, he could not string a coherent sentence together in an email or text message.
I’m extremely old-fashioned when it comes to spelling and grammar, especially when using it incorrectly can change the meaning of a sentence: “Let’s eat grandma!”, as opposed to “Let’s eat, grandma!”. Or “Stop clubbing baby seals”, as opposed to “Stop clubbing, baby seals”.
Previously on Barnflakes
The consortium of alphabets
Notes on Afflictions
Random Film Review: The Social Network
LinkedOut.com