Lol the OP, not mat.

I think he knew that though

@morphismus:

You can use they/their to refer to a single person if this is what you're getting at.

lol wut

Thought you wanted to point out the irony in my statement. Nevermind.

Blackf1re, I have been railing against this specific evil since the very beginning of the tweeting age. Civilization has regressed to proudly using it's thumbs as a primary source of communication, relying on 144 characters to convey the entirety of their thinking on complex topics, all the while proudly asserting the “advancement” of the modern age.

I can only assume that the future holds a multitude of vapidly ignorant “youngs” (Yes, this is a curt reminder to give wide berth to those gardening olds that you so decry…), typing so efficiently with their noses, while being limited to six total characters to express every thought that they will ever have. (Though, no doubt, that is four characters more than they will ever need.)

Fight the good fight, a valiant effort if there ever was one…

OP, watch Idiocracy. Accept it.

Hum, first I used "their" thumbs, but I didn't like that (because civilization seems singular there,) so then I changed it to "its" thumbs, but that didn't allow for the possessive. Now, I'm going with senility and I'm going to return to my gardening, as the OP so helpfully directed me to stick to.

it's is it is.

The first line in your complaint about proper grammar is a run-on sentence.

blackf1re

I am not a native speaker but I double-check every post before I send it to minimise any mistakes. The same can't be said for many other posters, sadly.

Could you explain why you believe this to be the case?

It looks perfectly OK to me.

Had it been written: "More and more people seem to be unwilling to use proper grammar and spelling on here it really makes for hard reading.", it would, indeed, have been a run on sentence. But it wasn't.

It's funny to see someone complain about spelling and then see his screen name.

Wow, tough crowd. I write a brief, buy pithy, satirical piece on the nature of words and all I get is a comment on an apostrophe. I can only assume that TeamTrousers is preemptively typing with his nose in order to more quickly foster in the modern age and I inadvertently struck a chord.

Now I know how Erasmus must have felt composing the words to "In Praise of Folly and I know exactly what he is doing now in the "modern" age,

TMBTDOPEW.

got it!

Then you be doin good.

His sentence needs a comma before the coordinating conjunction.

Shocked that no one pointed out the link to DN's famous 'Challange' thread.

That may be so, but it's definitely not a run on sentence, because, as you mention, the coordinating conjunction is present.

http://www.xavier.edu/writingcenter/...nts/run-on.pdf

http://books.google.com/books?id=GOE...ntence&f=false

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/definite

I'll go back to something you said in your OP:

"I am at a loss at why a forum as big as Two Plus Two doesn't do the same"

The fact that our forum is so big isn't an argument in favour of doing it; it's a reason why it isn't being done. With thousands of posts made every day, it would be a monumental job.

I don't know what to say to this other than...ugh.

I can't see any upside to basically telling visitors that account for millions of page views every year that if they can't post up to a certain grammatical standard (either because English isn't their first language, they are poor writers, or they are lazy), then we don't want their posts. And, as I said, it just isn't realistic anyway.

All that said, it's not like nothing is ever done about truly terrible posts. I just don't think you're going to see the day where we set a bar anywhere near as high as you'd like and enforce that across the entire site.

WP.

If it bothers you so much, try to hijack multiple threads with complaints about grammar and spelling and see if you can spark a grassroots movement against text speak that will make this place occasionally unusable due to grammer nits causing flame wars if texting lingo is not discouraged.

Especially given that "blackfire" was available when he created this account.