How the Internet Is Destroying Our Language

Photo of Eduardo Paolozzi mosaic inside Tottenham Court road tube station by Mark Hillary, via Flickr

Like many people with creative tendencies, I wear more than one “artistic” hat. I not only love to read, write and edit, but I also dabble in art, photography, poetry, bead-making and a form of mosaic known as pique assiette that uses pieces of broken crockery in place of colored glass.

You might be asking yourself what does any of this have to do with a blog about writing and editing? Quite a lot, in fact. My artistic ramblings led me to the world of t-shirt design and I was pleased to discover it was a lot of fun and brought in a few extra dollars each month.

A few years ago, I posted some tee designs on Amazon when they opened their print on demand division, known as Merch. These evergreen designs had all been best-sellers on other POD platforms in the past so I figured they were a good place to start.

And there they sat. I was pulling out my hair trying to figure out why my clever, amusing shirts weren’t selling while barely literate teen boys whose designs were frankly awful were routinely making $10,000 to $20,000 a month selling their tees. Seriously. They were. See why I was intrigued?

I started investigating and soon realized the difference came down to language skills. My insistence on using proper grammar and punctuation in my keywords was costing me sales because almost no one else in America cares about such things anymore. Why search for a t-shirt when it’s so much easier to search for a tshirt? That’s one less character to type, plus it’s so difficult to reach all the way up to the top of your keyboard to type a hyphen when, really, it’s not needed.

Why bother with possessive apostrophes when potential buyers looking for runners’ t-shirts are almost certainly searching for runners tshirts instead? The sheer number of adults whose grade school teachers never managed to convey the difference between your and you’re to them, nor the vaguest concept of why it might be important not to use them interchangeably is staggering. Now, on almost a daily basis, I see the pronoun “our” used in placed of the verb, “are.” I guess they do kind of sound alike...if you’re underwater with a motorboat running nearby.

These errors are creeping into headlines as well, and not just in local community newspapers. Last summer, the scroll on an NBC newscast read: “Turkey Trimmers.” Now you might be forgiven if you thought that meant a light-hearted story about someone who provides free haircuts for needy turkeys, but nope. The story was about a devastating 6.6 earthquake in the Aegean Sea that injured almost 500 people and caused millions of dollars in damage to homes and irreplaceable historic structures. I guess whoever wrote that scroll was actually looking for the term, “Turkey Tremors” instead. But there was no copy editor on hand to correct the mistake before it aired because most copy editors have been fired, because really, they're not needed anymore either, right? So I say the Internet is destroying our language, I mean that when people see errors repeatedly in print, either on the Internet on TV, or in trusted publications, the error becomes the norm as it is inculcated into our language as acceptable usage. And correct usage withers, dies away and becomes "archaic."

I would like to say I am carrying this noble grammar flag into battle but the truth is, I caved on this one. I now meekly peck out "writers tshirts" in my descriptions, cringing with every letter I type. I guess that makes me part of the problem now, but hey, if you can manage to make $10,000 a month selling anything that isn’t drugs, I guess you’re doing something right.

Addendum: For the record, I don’t make anywhere close to that amount selling t-shirts online. If I did, I’d be on some sun-soaked island in the Aegean Sea, keeping a watchful eye out for trimmers.

Patricia B. Smith is a journalist who is the author of 11 published books, including Idiot’s Guide: Flipping Houses, Alzheimer's For Dummies and Sleep Disorders for Dummies.

Pat is also an experienced professional developmental editor who serves as an Editorial Evaluation and Developmental Coordinator for Five Star Publishing. She works with private clients as well and has helped many authors land their first publishing contracts. Many of her clients have achieved notable success, including two winners of the Missouri Writers’ Guild Show-me Best Book of the Year Award.

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