The sabotage of the English language

Gone are those days where owning a bicycle was considered to be rich. All around you see luxurious automobiles with sophisticated features and gaudy designs. Gone are those days where we used to write letters. And if you ask a kid today, “Hey! Where’s your football?”, he’ll probably open his laptop or smartphone and start showing you his wonderful moves at football in a downloaded game!

The most surprising evolution that is still taking place in the 21st century is that of languages and spellings! From full words, it has evolved to what’s called “the INTERNET slang”. Even punctuation marks have evolved, sadly. A full stop was used to end a sentence and now if you want to end a sentence, people use strings of ellipses(...). An exclamation mark that was brought to us as the note of excitement is now used in every other sentence.

And oh my! Now it’s a world of smileys. So suddenly you will find a message on your social media messenger: “Hiiiiiiiiii... I jst tot of u .........!!!! My son olwyz ask abt u.”.

Every internet giant has come out, being competitive, with their latest and sleek designs of emoticons. When an application or a mobile app invents a new sets of smileys, the phone makers come out with their own sets of smileys.

Sometimes I wonder if in the next step would we be typing out only in smileys, because there are smileys for everything we do.

From eating to bathing and almost every sport, every food, everything, even numbers, it’s all smileys. So, if you ask me the traditional way of using commas and colons, even I have forgotten how to use them!

Everything has evolved. Ask me whether these are boon or a bane, I don’t know. Even I have evolved in my ways! If I’ve to think being a 1990s’ child was better, well, I don’t know that too!

The reader is based in Dubai.