My wife and I have four children who range in age from 10 to 15. They use e-mail, instant messaging, video conferencing, and other Internet tools daily to interact with their good friends from another family who live in another state.

We’ve taught our children to read and to love good literature. We’ve encouraged them to write. And we set the standards high.

The result is that it is truly a joy to watch them interact using technology. They use it for all sorts of creative endeavors. They’ve collaborated to write books, movie scripts, poetry, and songs. They constantly work on their web site together. Technology provides a way to cooperate that would not otherwise be possible.

And even Mr. Long might be pleased to watch this group of children and teens use instant messaging. Sure, they make use of abbreviations to save typing, but they also spend plenty of time discussing good books they’ve read and sharpening each other’s skills by correcting their own grammar and spelling.

There are strict interpreters of the language, there are loose interpreters of the language. The strict tried to chastise Keroauc for his Beat Mystique, they blasted Oscar Wilde for his crass sarcasm and ignored Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

He even notes:

Apologists will argue that language isn’t static, that it’s ever-changing and evolving. That’s true. Language does change. Idiomatic English is the product of centuries of social and cultural infusion, a fact that gives modern-day English much of its color and flair.

But when change does violence to the accepted standards of the king’s English and takes the mother tongue into the realm of the unfathomable, as does almost all jargon coming out of the technology and business worlds, it’s our job as keepers of the grail to drive it back into the dark little hole from whence it came.

Now, we can argue that all of us are slightly annoyed with the ‘brb’ and the ‘lol’ at times — but it stinks of a pompous, self righteous writer who has to dip his toe into something bigger than himself to announce a generation has done ‘violence’ to the accepted standards. Me oh my. Some people would call that evolution, breaking the rules, digging a new path, testing the waters, artistic merit, and whatever old school cliche you can think of to term what we know to be true: the times, they are a changin’, to quote Bob Dylan.

In the end, I’m not so sure his rant is really more than self righteous mental masturbation — I hope it makes him feel superior and, undoubtedly, forgotten.

That’s my counter rant:)

Now I’m all, like, ROFL.