Your Official Welcome to the Dawning of a New Age: The Age of Unashamed Spelling Incompetence.



Spelling.

Never Forget. 

A Serious Question: Is Spelling Any Word in the English Language Accurately Now Merely an Outdated Antiquity, Reminiscent of a More Refined Era? Is Spelling Now: Enemy Number One? Bothersome Annoyance? Or Technically Insignificant?

Trending Now: Your Official Welcome to the Dawning of a New Age: The Age of Unashamed Spelling Incompetence. 

Since the technological revolution has vaulted us all into the Age of: Possibly-Never-Having-to-Use-a-Pen-Again, my own, and I’m guessing that quite possibly your, spelling abilities have been on the long, slow decline.  Your current lack of spelling (not to mention grammar) skills sort of sneaks up on you.  Almost undetectably.  An insidious progression of deterioration.  Like the morning you look in the mirror and notice the lines in your face are more defined, your hair more peppered with gray.  Age sneaks up on you, just like your slow degradation of spelling skills that you now no longer need, because you type with autocorrect and spellcheck.  Personally, my spelling ability has recently pretty much hit rock bottom.  Current all-time low.   Plummeted to the depths of the level of a five year old.  I'm always surprising myself with new words that I no longer know how to spell.  Words that I used to know so well, up and down, top to bottom.  Like the back of my hand. 

Since the invent of spellcheck hijacked our collective spelling abilities, my question now becomes the following: is it even necessary to learn how to spell in the first place?  Is it a lost art?  Gone the way of the dinosaur?  And does anyone even really care anymore if words are spelled correctly anyways?  I mean, with texts flying back and forth with reckless abandon, emails shot through space via blackberries at the speed of light, Facebook messaging bombarding us from every angle, not to mention twitter tweets chirping up a storm, does anyone actually care if someone misspells the word: personnel (My own enemy accurate spelling word numero uno). 

In this day and age of communication overload, do the details really matter anymore?  I mean, you get the gist if I type personell (back off spellcheck! totally meant to misspell this time.) vs. the technically “correct” form of the word…and isn’t it even sort of a fun game to try to decode what people are actually trying to communicate electronically when they type too fast.  All systems go.  Gone to plaid.  Firing off emails like neuron’s firing after 5 cups of coffee.  While living in the fast lane, can any of us really be bothered anymore with tiny details such as spelling?  My theory is: not so much.  Because, in my mind, spelling is sooooo 90’s.  Tres passé at this point. 

If anyone actually bothered to make mention of that tremendously grammatically incorrect email you just fired off with reckless abandon, which might quite possibly make your high school grammar teacher faint upon reading, wouldn’t you be sincerely surprised?  Shocked almost, that someone actually took the time to follow up with a response that corrected your poor choice of wording, grammar and spelling?  Because, ultimately, they got the gist, picked up what you were throwing down.  Why even bother to care if you misspelled <insert word that continually transcends comprehension of correct spelling here>.

Sometimes, I like to think of it as a personal challenge to try to decode the message that someone is attempting to transmit, in the worst way humanly possible.  Like a crossword puzzle.  A mystery yet to be solved.  Like cracking a code…their use of grammar and spelling is so poor, declined so much further down the scale than your own, that it’s a contest to decode their “hidden message”, lost amongst the wreckage of the English language gone awry.  As opposed to actually writing said person back to clarify what they really meant.  Because, in all seriousness, who has the time in this day and age to really focus on spelling when there’s so many other important things going on in the world?  Like Newt Gingrich’s latest racial slur, for example.  It's hard to keep up!

We are all on the slippery slope of spelling extinction, folks, and there’s no coming back.  No passing go.  No collecting $200.  We are all at different levels of spelling ineptitude in this inevitable process of phase-out.  And it’s high time we acknowledge that machines would beat us in a spelling bee every single time.  On any day of the week.  No contest.  Hands down.

One can make the comparison of modern era language to the proper English of the 17^th century, the days of Shakespeare, for which I need a personal translator to even navigate through to get anywhere close to effectively understanding what he’s trying to say.  Even in the late 19^th century, Ben Franklin’s Poor Richards Almanac, which was a supposedly down to earth and “man of the people” style of writing is difficult to navigate and comprehend with any degree of certainty.  Take, for example, this quote: “Avarice and Happiness never saw each other, how then shou’d they become acquainted.”  Can you make neither hide nor hair of that?  No?  Me neither.  Step one: look up definition of avarice…There’s also this: “Who has deceiv’d thee so oft as thy self?”  I mean, when was the last time you used thee or thy, or oft for that matter, in a sentence?  Probably not in our lifetimes, unless you were recently at a Renaissance Fair.  And finally, there’s this: “Proclaim not all thou knowest, all thou owest, all thou hast, nor all thou canst.”  Prime example of flowery language gone by the wayside,  regardless of how wise or insightful his message was.   I suppose we could always go retro and start referring to each other as thee, thy and adding “Ye Olde” in front of anything we care to visit.  For example, I’m going to go to “Ye Olde Electronics Store” tomorrow morning.  As well as adding est to every verb we might use.  Combining it all together we might get something like the following:  “To-Morrow I do seek to runest on ye olde treadmill at ye olde gym, whilst thoust sittest upon thy olde couch and withers, ever a mark of folly, as we are so oft to do.”  Bringin’ back old school…Ben Franklin style.

What’s my overall point in this article, you might ask? Let me spell it out for you.  No one cares about spelling anymore, myself included (not to mention honey badger, but I digress…).  It’s high time that someone officially welcome us all into the Era of Post-Modern Spelling Nonexistence.  The Age of Aquarius, where-we-don’t-even-bother-to-hit-spellcheck, and bask in our own ignorant misspelling bliss.  Frolic in our ability to cut through the noise, and focus on what’s truly important: the subject of the latest South Park episode?  Acknowledge that which we can outsource to computers, freeing us to hone in on bigger and better things.  Feeling no guilt whatsoever for our lack of knowledge, skills and abilities in this particular area where computers picked up where we left off.  We passed the baton, and we are proud.  Well, maybe not proud, but more likely, are simply too busy keeping up with the Kardashians to care.

So, welcome, world, to what we’ve all been waiting for.  A new age within the space-time continuum, where we officially acknowledge that spelling no longer matters, entirely insignificant in the grander scheme of things.  Because this is the dawning of the Age of “outsourcing-anything-that-we-can-think-of-that-is-too-bothersome-to-endeavor-upon-ourselves”.  The Age of Unashamed Spelling Incompetence.  The true Age of Aquarius. 

So let us join hands, sing Cumbayá, and “let the sunshine in” by listening to the song below. To properly welcome in this new Age of “Spelling Bee Extinction”.  May we forever be free of having to feel that familiar pang of guilt at the realization we’ve fired off an email chock full of spelling and grammatical errors to our most important client: one who happens to be an English teacher.  Welcome to the true age of harmony and understanding.  Words are no longer necessary here.  At least ones that are correctly spelled.  The age of true freedom of speech, er writing.

So, RIP Spelling.  We’ll never forget you and the declining impact that you’ve had on our collective lives. It’s a shame you had to leave so soon, but we’re onto bigger and better things, such as Snookie’s latest love interest on Jersey Shore.

Spelling. Never Forget. RIP.

Mystic Crystal Revelations.  Age of Aquarius.   When the Moon is in the 7^th house.