The Death of Punctuation (and Intelligence)

The intertubes have done many wonderful things for us. They've given us Mahir, lolcats, and lots of lovely, beautiful women. They've piped works of musical genius into our homes and offices and allowed us to shop for pretty much anything we like whenever we want.

But perhaps the most endearing aspect of the hyper-democratisation of the now-technified masses is the way in which the interwebs have given voice to those who previously had none. Sullen, semi-educated malcontents across the globe now have more outlets for their partially formed opinions than they can possibly address in one long, slow afternoon of unemployment. And it all comes wrapped up in some of the most elegant prose ever to grace either paper or pixel.

Take for example these nuggets of excellence from YouTube, which now serves as the primary opened spigot for butchered rants and hateful abuse hurled by anonymous cranks at faceless others from behind the comfort of a Windows firewall. It's all just a bit too easy for anyone at all to inflict themselves on YouTube, and the end result is the most dumbed down version of toilet wall taunts available to the species. At least with the toilet wall you were limited to a few brief lines; YouTube lets you write and write and write.

In this instance the topic of conversation is Gatchaman, which probably requires some explanation, but it's a nerdy path we're not going to walk down right now. Maybe I'll get into that some other time. For now keep your focus on the voice of the masses, not on the nerdiness of Gatchaman.

dude stop kissin ramosnef ass its not about us bein rude its about u not lookin at the show for what it is a good show its to many people in the world they always put dumb ways of thinkin in the mix its always got to be about race of she or he is fat or the sex of the person thats dumb its just people need to carin about dumb shit like that this world wil die out people carin so must about money looks race

Where do we start with this little literary marvel? Is it the total lack of punctuation that lets the writer's inner voice shine so brightly? Perhaps it's the complete neglect afforded the letter G at the end of any verb operating in the continuous tense. Best of all I like the obligatory newspeak substitution of "u" for "you". When you do that everyone knows you're hip. I'm mean ur hip.

i forgot to put stop in between to - carin in the last comment sorry but im not mad at u its just why care about that theres a big guy in g-force hell when power rangers came out did u know alot of black people was mad became the black ranger was a black guy that was dumb of them to think like that its was just a tv show people hid to make its about race

I was really, really tempted to shift the case of the block of text to upper case in order to lend it more oomph, you know? Anything in upper case is by definition more readable and packs more oomph.

What I like here is that our writer is attempting to make some kind of racial/social commentary vis-a-vis the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. For my liking the Power Rangers was just a stupid kids' show about stupid kids making stupid hand gestures while wearing stupid coloured tights in a stupid big robot. That's stupid stuff. But our comment poster has gone spelunking in the cultural depths of the Power Rangers and surfaced with a trophy. If he's so sharp when it comes to the Power Rangers imagine the social analogs he'd draw with the Ferengi and Romulans from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Our friend isn't done yet either. All the lack of capitalisation and talk of racial issues has gone and punched his buttons enough to get him to shift his razor-sharp intellect to the topic of obesity and weight issues. My personal favourite is the bit about the jumping jacks.

and dude just because a persons slim dont make them better i know alot of slim people who are very weak cant even do 100 jumpin jack how sad and the bad thing about it know some bigger people who can do 200 jumpin jack size means nothin its heart gatchman 5 got heart hes the best one like in voltron the yellow loin is a big guy he can take care of his self i like this cartoon because they show all people can do the job no matter of u slim fat a girl old or young its ass kickin time

Creeping into his screed is a version of the old "believe in yourself and you can do anything" maxim that Hollywood is so fond of milking, but the whole "Voltron's yellow loin" thing has me miffed. Since he's described as being a "big guy" does that mean his loin is ample and yellow? Perhaps he's jaundiced. Then he caps it all off with a spin on the "we're all awesome and capable in our own special way" cliche that gets wheeled out for an airing on just about any given Saturday morning cartoon. Exactly what he's getting at with "girl old" has me at a loss. It seems like an oxymoron but I'm almost certainly missing something, just like I'm confused about how anyone can be "slim fat". Maybe that's similar to when people say "bad" when they really mean "good". "Hey man ur lookin totally slim fat today." It's got a ring to it. At any rate I couldn't really care less 'cause it's ass kickin time and that's all I need to know.

The weird thing is that there's actually a kind of consistency to the spelling and grammar that's being employed. The rule states that if you're going to get it wrong, at least get it wrong consistently. Anything in the continuous tense gets no terminating G, caps are irrelevant and most words—we'll discount his "you" substitutions—are spelled surprisingly correctly. What blows my mind the most is that he's comfortable passing off this type of writing as legitimate communication. Somewhere since the advent of the Mosaic browser in 1993 and the introduction of txt msgs, the standards of acceptable written communication have dropped to the point where a 31 year old can wantonly jettison a few hundred years worth of established convention for the sake of expediency. From what I've seen and been told, this phenomenon is hardly unique to YouTube. Check just about any online forum. Moreover around 50% of the emails you receive from professional adults—we'll leave the current crop of teenagers out of this for now; that's a whole separate bag—almost certainly exhibit some of these traits. Commas? Fuck 'em. Full stops? Never needed them. Colons and semi-colons? Let's drop the anal fixation.

The more I think about it the more I'm inclined to give the man a medal for his interpretive use of the English language. He's riding a tide here. Through what amounts to abject laziness, he's found a way to subvert written English into an almost entirely new form, specially tailored to meet the needs of the write-now, press-submit, think-later demands of personal exchanges over da web. George Orwell would be proud.