MySpace: Where Grammar and Punctuation Go to Die

The ungrammatical nonsense on MySpace gave me daily sick headaches to the point where I had to delete my account. It's a great website, albeit one with a staggering plurality of lousy spellers. I'm referring to the adults. (Teens speak in their own lexicon of IM shorthand and cryptograms.) We're all naturally good for a typo here or an error there, but apparently, an entire generation of twenty- and thirtysomethings skipped twelve or thirteen years of English courses, or else they studied Bizarro English. Their spaces had me banging my head against the wall and dropping anvils from tall buildings on myself. The day that I almost picked out a coffin to get away from it all was the day I cancelled my account. When you first join MySpace, you assume that the glaring errors on someone's page are an anomaly. How quickly you learn the truth! In this case, the truth doesn't set anyone free. It shackles all but the ignorant.

"Shackled at last! Shackled at last!"

In the beginning, it's oddly amusing, then it becomes vexing, and finally, it drives you berserk. After thorough research, I've determined the root cause: idiocy coupled with laziness bordering on carelessness combined with predictability. Seeing a complete sentence on a random stranger's page would keep me from purposefully eating forty bear claws to enter into a sublime sugar coma. Seeing a semicolon used correctly would keep me from turning to cyanide. Seeing adjectives besides "outgoing," "fun," "unique," or "energetic," forced me to forget about drinking that enticing cup of hemlock that I'd permanently positioned just beyond arm's length.

A preponderance of MySpacers don't understand the idea of periods. Semicolons don't exist in their worlds, as comma splices seem to be the norm. Sentences that run on and on and on and on are everywhere. Non sequiturs are prevalent. They ignore or unknowingly mix metaphors and similes. Adverbs are clearly a foreign concept. Capital letters are at times an abstruse notion. For all of their vainglory and me-me-me attitudes, a scant few care about the enormous power of language. If their pictures were as ugly as their words, these Medusas would turn millions to stone.

What can you do about it, save sabotaging and shutting done MySpace? Zilch. And that's why I had to leave my "friends" behind. Not having anyone to talk to is better than being dismayed by his or her penchant for shoddy, laughable grammar and lack of punctuation. I miss MySpace. I do. What I don't miss is vomiting over the sink after reading someone's incomprehensible blurb while Paris Hilton's "Stars Are Blind" plays in the background.