for his misuse of the word “to.”
By TAYLOR
FARNSWORTH
Opinions Editor
Scrolling through social media is often times harmless. Users post about his or her daily activities, or discuss latest trends and political scandals. But in some cases, it becomes daunting as you witness again the misuse of grammar in a 140-character tweet or Facebook post. Your blood begins to boil as you find yourself screaming at your computer screen that it is not “your” it is “you’re.”
The age of social media has taken everything we learned about grammar back in our early years of education and thrown it out the window. English grammar is becoming replaced by gifs, emoticons, and texting abbreviations. A period after a sentence no longer concludes one’s thought. The lack of a comma now makes two unrelated thoughts come together as one. Run-on sentences make the reader feel out of breath. And don’t get me started on how often I see punctuation marks outside of quotation marks. These situations raise the question of how come we allow improper use of grammar to slide on social media, but not in academia?
The question was brought to my attention as I found Donald Trump Jr at the center of social media ridicule for his misuse of the word to. In a tweet following his daughter’s trick-or-treating, Trump Jr posted a photo of her dressed up as a police officer holding out her basket of candy. Above the photo he tweeted, “I’m going to take half of Chloe’s candy tonight & give it to some kid who sat at home. It’s never to early to teach her about socialism.”
Shortly after posting the tweet, Trump Jr was the comic relief for all grammar Nazis. The misuse of the word to may seem like an excuse to knitpick any and every flaw of the Trump administration, but it isn’t just the White House misusing grammar on social media, we are all guilty.
Shortening our sentences with text lingo might be fine for the sake of convenience and speed, but when someone is trying to be politically correct on the web, no one should be let off the hook for the misuse of a word, or shortening of a phrase such as “sup” opposed to “what’s up.” The shortened phrases may work when you’re limited to a 140-character count, but it doesn’t excuse someone who tweets the word “weak” when they meant to say “week,” or “women” when they meant to say “woman.”
Grammar may appear to be a boring subject. It’s something that some may think shouldn’t be taken literally on social media, but I beg to differ. When it comes to grammar, it is what distinguishes someone from appearing literate to completely uneducated. Social media should not be used as a platform to simply regurgitate information without proper substance and structure to what it is you are saying.
The importance of grammar and spelling can be summed up in a single word: covfefe.
