Happy New Year’s and welcome to 2008, everyone.

I see that the use of English continues to degenerate into some electronic media-driven abortion of its beautiful person.

Probably, most if not all of you heard of the tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo on Christmas Day that left one 17-year-old dead.

We certainly all grieve for this unfortunately incident and loss of a human being just going into the prime of life.

However, even in death the transformation of English from a beautiful means of expression–lyrical, powerful, persuasive–to ae e-mail, textmail aberration continues almost unchallenged.

A Web site immediately was launched in honor of the fallen youth, but it was riddled with all the faults of a generation not taught English and consumed (transfixed is better) by electronic media.

The site had not one capital letter, not at the start of sentences or anywhere, and about every second or third sentence started out, "ur…."

I’m sure the folks over at the Oxford Enlgish Dictionary are already recognizing ur as the modern version of you are.  I wonder if they’ll demand that the u be capitalized at the start of a sentence.

Probably not.

Happy Nu Yere!