Now, I rather love e-mail.  It fulfills the need to communicate with the outside world without painful and tedious phone conversations. There’s less room for misunderstandings.  It doesn’t barge its way into your life and it doesn’t demand to be dealt with this instant.  You can skim the boring or superfluous parts without spending hours making agreeable noises and doodling. It’s the perfect way to communicate with people without actually having to deal with them.  But despite all these wonderful features, some people manage – feel the duty – to misuse it.

So, your e-mail pings and you go look at the message with all the anticipation of someone who knows that this could mean one less phone call.  Chances are it’s spam. Someone, at some point, entered your e-mail on an internet form and now you can’t get away from the stuff. Then there’s the dangers of chain letters; scared of threats of injury and death if they don’t pass them on, your friends blindly forward every single one on to you.

Even assuming it’s none of the above, you’re not out of trouble yet. The first thing you see is the title.  Of course, no one bothers to write something useful here. And they just have to show how important and exciting the message is. So assuming you even have a title, it’s inevitably something along the lines of “Hello!!!!!!!!!!!!!”.  Which is just so helpful in explaining that this message is, in fact, about catching a movie on Friday.

None the wiser about the topic, you open your friend’s message and they’ve apparently sent it to their entire address book. You have to scroll down through screens upon screens of e-mail addresses before you can actually read what they’ve written. And now everyone they’ve sent it to has your e-mail address. Which probably includes their workmates, third cousins, great aunt Dotty and that guy they met once a concert five years ago; the people to whom you would go out of your way to never ever give your e-mail address. And yet if they had bothered to just type all the addresses into the “Bcc” field instead of the “To” field, you would be faced with a neat little “recipients undisclosed” instead of all these issues. It’s not like it even requires any more effort on their part, and so I am left to conclude that it’s either sheer ignorance or willful perversity that leads to this crime.

Five minutes of scrolling through addresses (and many shudders over who now knows your address) later, you finally reach the body of the message.  Heaven forbid this should be written with proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling.  The writer may have a full QWERTY keyboard, but that makes no difference. It’s the Internet and so they feel free to ignore capitalization, throw in full stops, commas and apostrophes only when convenient, and invent whatever spellings they wish.  In fact, if they bother with any capital letters or punctuation at all, it’s probably because it’s all in capitals and every other sentence ends in an exclamation mark. Given the number of contractions, apparently space is at a premium and too many key strokes may break a finger. As for the vowels, there’s a liberal sprinkling of “u” ‘s all by their lonesome and no others in sight. Proof-reading is an unknown concept. Never mind such things as using the correct homophone, tense or article. If questioned, the standard response is – paraphrased for legibility – a very offended “what do you think this is, an English essay?” as if that is the only time you’d bother with such niceties. Yes, according to these people “hw r u atm btw wthr bd cn u cm frdy 2 mv thtr plz! KTHX” makes perfect sense.

After you’ve made the effort to decipher all of this garbage you realize it has nothing to do with you anyway.  Yep, they only want to invite two people but it was more convenient to send it to everyone in their address book. Then those other two people decide to continue to let everyone else share the fun by hitting “reply all” and thus sending you ten more e-mails in the same vein. Doesn’t it make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside? In a “let’s just kill them all” kind of way?

Tags: communication, e-mail, internet speak, spelling