Respect is a Four-Letter Word

Respect is a four-letter word. Well, it is if you're texting. "I nd yu 2 rspt me." Yep! That's how the texting minimalists say "I need you to respect me." Since all the younger members of my family want to communicate by texting from their smart phones, I've had to learn a whole new language, and at my age, that's not easy. My difficulties with texting are three-fold: 1) My fingers are too big and clumsy, and they move too slowly on the miniature keyboard,  2) It takes so long for me to write a message that I sometimes forget what I was saying, 3) The disrespect for the proper use of the English language is disturbing to me.

When I attended school from 1952-1964, the teachers drew a  line in the sand and then stepped back with their red pens and grade books in their hands and said,  "If you step across this line into the area of misspelled words, improper grammar, and punctuation errors you will get a failing grade." And they meant it. Then they would walk up and down the aisles, picking students indiscriminately to ask them how to punctuate or conjugate a sentence or spell a word.  If the student answered correctly, the teacher would move on to the next student. If they were wrong, the teacher would hit them on the top of the head with their college class ring. And I'm not making that up.

"OK, LTS STP RGT HR!" you text. "THT IS NT RGT! THT IS DSRSPTFL!" you say.

Yes, you are correct. That is disrespectful, but at least we baby boomers were presented to the world with the ability to put a complete, proper, and correct sentence together.