Grammar, Spelling, and the Internet

You could write a book about this, but for me it will just be a paragraph or three. May I just say that I absolutely adore the way the internet embraces and codifies crappy grammar and misspelling? For all its glorious YouTubishness the web remains, for me, mostly a text medium, one that can proliferate an amusing mistake all over the world in a matter of hours, and gather it up into the shaggy, loving arms of its accepted lexicon. The rallying cry of this new world of intentional awkwardness must certainly be "All your base are belong to us," a poorly-translated-from-Japanese phrase discovered in a 1989 videogame called Zero Wing. It's perfect in its earnest near-meaningfulness, and earnest near-meaningfulness is what the internet is all about.

Take, for instance, the typo teh, which never ceases to amuse me; there's a whole freaking Wikipedia page about it (see link), which contains this glorious bit of dorkitude:

Furthermore, teh is sometimes used in front of a verb in a novel form of gerund. The best-known example of this is the word "suck". Thus, the phrase "this sucks" can be converted into "this is teh suck"; the word pwn can be similarly converted (teh pwn). The latter phrase is primarily used by the computer gaming community, and often intended humorously.

Aren't you glad you live in the kind of world where that paragraph can come into being? I think my current favorite use for intentionally-awkward internet slang are these little jpegs you see here and there that feature a cute kitten surrounded by boldface-courier type that reads "Is this teh intrawebs?" or "I made you a cookie, but I eated it." These images, friends, are the "Hang in there, baby!" of our generation.

Of course having a retard for a President only fuels this movement; Bush has given us "the Google" and "the internets," but I'm a little less comfortable using these malapropisms, as I strongly suspect that they aren't really mistakes, but coded messages to the base, assuring them that their Fearless Leader is still a down-home country boy and not some Frenchified in-touch-with-the-culture liberal. But this is Ward Six, not DailyKos, so I'll shut it.