(apologies for the shitty photoshop, I couldn't be bothered spending wasting hours on it.

Well, it's official in my mind, the english language is truly dead. Maybe it's been dead for a while and I haven't noticed, I don't know.

I realised in a computing lecture today. I was sitting with my friends, and the girl beside me opened up a letter from a friend she had received (the university I'm at, Edinburgh, has a lot of students from England and further afield). Now, think what you will of me, but when she pulled it out I glanced over to see what she had. The first thing I noticed was the first line, which had a smiley face.

Well, that's ok - it's an informal letter, girls will be girls and so on.

Then I saw on the next line something like, "What are you doing 4 this.."

4?! Since when did slang like that become anywhere near acceptable for writing a letter? I'm not a grammar nazi, and I'm sure my grammar could use improvement, but when text-speak leaks out into written letters something is very very wrong.

I can understand why people use substitutions such as for/4 in SMSs - you have a limited number of characters, and it's easy enough to read once you have the hang of it. I don't like it on the internet, but there's not much you can do about it, and plenty of people type slowly, so maybe they see some speed benefit.

I draw the line at handwritten letters.

This is it, this is the line in the sand which I had mentally drawn, and someone just urinated all over it.

I must admit, I got a little worked up about it, but I think I was justified under the circumstances. I was then told by people that "spelling didn't matter between friends". Apparently spelling is something formal and dignified that you should only bother about on your CV. Even then, they probably only use the spell-check in word. Every time I see "..., which ..." where I should see "... that ..." I just know that someone has run the grammar check on word, and just 'corrected' everything it points out.

Now, I guess it's time for me to mourn the language. I'll probably have a programming-related update in a few days once I'm done with my scripting system. I've got the parser complete, but I need to shift it from parsing text, to compiling text to bytecode and parsing bytecode. Hopefully it won't be much of a shift.