On Langauge? Meh. On the joke that is web grammar.
I’m fascinated by Virginia Hefferman’s latest NYT column. “Consider [this] example,” she writes:
To show that Web users are curious about human reproduction, I might quote kavya on Yahoo Answers, word for word: “How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?”
But that makes kavya look like an idiot. Readers might miss the sweet earnestness of his question. Maybe he (or she) is 7 or a native speaker of Hungarian. I should cut the kid a typographical break; that’s not an easy question to ask. The cockamamie diction and syntax of Internet English is, possibly, only incidental to his inquiry. A reporter could paraphrase or revise his question — “How is a baby formed?” — lest readers get blinded to the intent of the question by moronizing typos.
