A new Generation's Moniker.
I have gone by the Idea that every generation has a name. There was the X, the Baby Boomer, and many other names, but yet to be determined is a name for our current young teenage wasteland slackers growing up. How could we not name them? How could this be forgotten? Through careful consideration, I have picked the following for the ages 13-17, currently.
OMGLOL (aka: Abbreviation Generation).
The facts ring true. I've been an internet addict since grade 10(1995!), and there were no such things as abbreviations for words that I'd never realized could have them. When I was a roaming IRC addict under the name alienreject, we made sentences. The word "HA!" was used as a form of expressing laughter. When people were excited, no one used "!!!!" and then hit the enter key. There was a sense of writing sentences. There was less ADD. More kids have seemed to been inflicted with ADD(or it's sister ADHD - thank you Clone High) these days, as a full sentence in any chatroom can range between the question mark or the exclamation mark.
And thus raises my point. More and more all over the place, things like
, or "WTF? OMG!" can take complete ideas that someone has, and slash down the amount of words they use. People my age(and the age of bipolargirl, who's been using the net before the Matrix was anything with anything) have adapted to this idea, and it frightens me. How many kids will grow up not knowing how to complete a sentence? At this exact moment I am perusing random journals for features on this(as you can if you wanted at Greatestjournal.com's site. Click on one of the pictures and find it) plague we have, and here is an actual entry from someone:
nothin much. i went on google and found osme pics of flames, so we'll knwo how to color them on the board 4 our hovercraft. i amm so tired. after comin home from school and mowin the yeard and stuffz i am poofed. lol. >YAWN< what to sa what to say- after my last journey entry i fell asleep. lol. (and i'm still tired) thank god the only hw i have due is math- and it waz only 5 problems. i hope we dob't have a current event on friday cuz i am not in mood to write one at all. and i 4got to paint my nails 2. fiddlesticks! ah well, i'll paint them 2morrow when i come home from school. i am not cookin anything 2morrow. i deserve a break, lol. well i got to get ready 4 bed, so see yaz.
You see my point. Take as many liberties with the English language as you can child, you're on your way to death in the boardroom if you make it there.
Maybe it's me, maybe it's the teachers, but I never even had the opportunity if you can call it that, to write like that. There was never a second where I wanted to take a short way out of a sentence, because to me, every word means something. Sure, sometimes I've been known to use something l337 (which is a whole different story that I'd rather not get into), but the idea that I could use the word tomorrow written as '2morro' is completely beyond my comprehension.
Again, I ramble, but I would really like to see a book report, or a four page document on Hamlet by the person written above. Would it all be written like this, or would it be words stolen from the internet, completely stale and square, with no imagery written, no heart? Are we losing our language in one fell swoop of this new "Generation" as I call it? Dear god I hope not. Maybe a good idea for these people would be to force them, sit them down to read Thompson, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Vonnegut, people that made words leap off the pages and into your mind, people that made you think that whatever it was that they were writing meant something? Maybe the only way to get the English language back is to wait it out, because it's not only affecting that. Our music industry is in peril. It's hard to turn on a radio and not hear something played every hour. Big blockbuster movies get awards over smaller independant ones that really make people go home with big ideas in their heads. ADD strikes again. I've read some books and seen movies that made me finish them with wonderment. These things made me want to pick up my pants and start writing, to change my whole life. That's what life is. It's not necessarily a big blockbuster hit with the stars of the hour who are showing you their shiny new haircuts just so you can spend your hard earned money on them. No one wants to look. into the idea of a movie you've never heard of delighting you enough to change your mood. No one has the attention span to sit through the Redux of Apocalypse now (no one in this so-called generation, I must re-iterate).
As always, there are exceptions to every rule, and I'm sure there are some that get exceptions in this case (My roommate for one. I may have molested part of her mind into thinking so, but who knows). Always are there the people with enough light in them to carry on in spite of the doomed, but the problem is that the light at the end of the tunnel that shines brightly on the people who light up rooms with savvy and smarts, regardless of how old they are is dimming.
The OMGLOL generation is hitting us with a ton of bricks. When we're old and whithered, we won't talk in sentences, we'll talk in abbreviations that are completely unheard of right now. We'll say five words to complete a paragraph, and entries like these in journals will be a forgotten taste acquired by the people who remembered how to love a line of sentence and make it really mean something.
Editor's note: I do understand writing an entry this long does turn into an oxymoron when I write of people's attention spans, and that is why I am ready to tear into any comment, regardless of who it is if they bring up a point that does not compute, or something that has nothing to do with the topic. It's my way of protection against this entry.
Also, to further my Idea, I've left parts of this on a Message board post in a place where most of the people are not lackluster in the way they write. See the hilarious consequences, if anybody replies to that post, or this one.
OMGLOL (aka: Abbreviation Generation).
The facts ring true. I've been an internet addict since grade 10(1995!), and there were no such things as abbreviations for words that I'd never realized could have them. When I was a roaming IRC addict under the name alienreject, we made sentences. The word "HA!" was used as a form of expressing laughter. When people were excited, no one used "!!!!" and then hit the enter key. There was a sense of writing sentences. There was less ADD. More kids have seemed to been inflicted with ADD(or it's sister ADHD - thank you Clone High) these days, as a full sentence in any chatroom can range between the question mark or the exclamation mark.
And thus raises my point. More and more all over the place, things like
, or "WTF? OMG!" can take complete ideas that someone has, and slash down the amount of words they use. People my age(and the age of bipolargirl, who's been using the net before the Matrix was anything with anything) have adapted to this idea, and it frightens me. How many kids will grow up not knowing how to complete a sentence? At this exact moment I am perusing random journals for features on this(as you can if you wanted at Greatestjournal.com's site. Click on one of the pictures and find it) plague we have, and here is an actual entry from someone:
nothin much. i went on google and found osme pics of flames, so we'll knwo how to color them on the board 4 our hovercraft. i amm so tired. after comin home from school and mowin the yeard and stuffz i am poofed. lol. >YAWN< what to sa what to say- after my last journey entry i fell asleep. lol. (and i'm still tired) thank god the only hw i have due is math- and it waz only 5 problems. i hope we dob't have a current event on friday cuz i am not in mood to write one at all. and i 4got to paint my nails 2. fiddlesticks! ah well, i'll paint them 2morrow when i come home from school. i am not cookin anything 2morrow. i deserve a break, lol. well i got to get ready 4 bed, so see yaz.
You see my point. Take as many liberties with the English language as you can child, you're on your way to death in the boardroom if you make it there.
Maybe it's me, maybe it's the teachers, but I never even had the opportunity if you can call it that, to write like that. There was never a second where I wanted to take a short way out of a sentence, because to me, every word means something. Sure, sometimes I've been known to use something l337 (which is a whole different story that I'd rather not get into), but the idea that I could use the word tomorrow written as '2morro' is completely beyond my comprehension.
Again, I ramble, but I would really like to see a book report, or a four page document on Hamlet by the person written above. Would it all be written like this, or would it be words stolen from the internet, completely stale and square, with no imagery written, no heart? Are we losing our language in one fell swoop of this new "Generation" as I call it? Dear god I hope not. Maybe a good idea for these people would be to force them, sit them down to read Thompson, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Vonnegut, people that made words leap off the pages and into your mind, people that made you think that whatever it was that they were writing meant something? Maybe the only way to get the English language back is to wait it out, because it's not only affecting that. Our music industry is in peril. It's hard to turn on a radio and not hear something played every hour. Big blockbuster movies get awards over smaller independant ones that really make people go home with big ideas in their heads. ADD strikes again. I've read some books and seen movies that made me finish them with wonderment. These things made me want to pick up my pants and start writing, to change my whole life. That's what life is. It's not necessarily a big blockbuster hit with the stars of the hour who are showing you their shiny new haircuts just so you can spend your hard earned money on them. No one wants to look. into the idea of a movie you've never heard of delighting you enough to change your mood. No one has the attention span to sit through the Redux of Apocalypse now (no one in this so-called generation, I must re-iterate).
As always, there are exceptions to every rule, and I'm sure there are some that get exceptions in this case (My roommate for one. I may have molested part of her mind into thinking so, but who knows). Always are there the people with enough light in them to carry on in spite of the doomed, but the problem is that the light at the end of the tunnel that shines brightly on the people who light up rooms with savvy and smarts, regardless of how old they are is dimming.
The OMGLOL generation is hitting us with a ton of bricks. When we're old and whithered, we won't talk in sentences, we'll talk in abbreviations that are completely unheard of right now. We'll say five words to complete a paragraph, and entries like these in journals will be a forgotten taste acquired by the people who remembered how to love a line of sentence and make it really mean something.
Editor's note: I do understand writing an entry this long does turn into an oxymoron when I write of people's attention spans, and that is why I am ready to tear into any comment, regardless of who it is if they bring up a point that does not compute, or something that has nothing to do with the topic. It's my way of protection against this entry.
Also, to further my Idea, I've left parts of this on a Message board post in a place where most of the people are not lackluster in the way they write. See the hilarious consequences, if anybody replies to that post, or this one.