I love words. Always have, always will. I love playing with the English language, I am shamelessly amused by puns, I like rude words, cheeky words, onamatopaeic words, funny sounding words, words that amuse, insult, criticise, describe, entertain... So I get really annoyed by the lack of respect the English language gets shown in this era of gnat-like attention spans and text messages. Don't get me wrong. I love a good SMS. They are brilliant for quick and easy communication, especially when you can't be bothered talking to people. But those irritating abbreviations, such as "gr8" and "LOL", are bloody annoying outside of the realm of personal texts between friends. (Hell, I still text out "tomorrow" rather than "2moro" in a text, such is my disdain for text speak.)

I do realise this makes me seem curmudgeonly, cranky, old before my time but I don't care. That anonymous idiot who infiltrated Mushroom's blog was just an asinine pain in the rectum. It is an effort, it hurts my eyes, it causes me physical pain, to pick through the twigs and bones of improper words and sentences. And now, on a daily basis at work. I get emails from public relations twats, allegedly professional people who are supposed to be paid communicators, full of irritating abbreviations and emoticons. It's not clever. It's lazy, it's juvenile and it is a way of legitimising poor use of English. English, when used properly and cleverly, is a brilliant tool for communication, entertainment, information and getting opinions across.

The death of proper words and proper sentences is a sad day for the English language, for a language with a rich and fascinating history (check out Melvyn Bragg's work on this topic). I don't like the dumbing down of English. I'm sure there are plenty of people, probably the same ones who are emailing Germaine Greer about her Steve Irwin column, who would, if they stumbled upon my blog, accuse me of being an intellectual elitist. "Intellectual elitist" has just become easy and convenient insult for those too lazy to form a proper opinion. Or too lazy to write words in their entirety. I can only imagine the barely literate dross that Germaine Greer would have had to endure in her inbox after some paper back in Australia printed her email address. She has my full sympathy.