Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
People have been writing grammatically (not to mention syntactically) horrifying letters and hand-written notes to each other for centuries. The text medium is not the enemy of literacy.
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Another problem with the "txting is dumbing us down" straw man is that there is almost ZERO relationship between spelling and grammar, despite what pedantic prescriptivist peevers preach.
A typographical error is seldom a grammatical error, and it was interesting to see two posts above complaining about spelling as a sign of decreased literacy both containing spelling errors.
Guy Deutscher's excellent "The Unfolding of Language" has a great section in it that is a collection of "English is going to hell, it's not like the good old days" quotes from Orwell to Swift and beyond. The Venerable Bede probably muttered into his cups about it too.
We live in a world that responded to a pandemic by producing and distributing a whole new class of vaccines in less than 12 months from the appearance of the virus - not the sign of a species that is growing "dumber", imho.