Eye Right Good

I've always been a pretty good speller, mostly thanks to my voracious reading habit. The more books one reads, the more likely it is that a misspelled word just looks wrong. It's almost like a gut feeling.

Enter the internet.

Online, especially on social media and in any comments section anywhere, there is no oversight. Nothing has to meet with the approval of an editor. Instead, consonants and vowels are vomited forth in all sorts of peculiar permutations. The come to rest in the blazing alien light of our screens, looking like murder victims waiting to be autopsied. Basic grammatical decency is abandoned. Reliance on spellcheck results in improper word usage. Laziness turns decent words into barely comprehensible strings of acronyms and abbreviations.

I think the internet is actually harming my ability to spell. I get so used to seeing errors that sometimes I have to second guess myself when I'm writing. Misspelled words no longer immediately look wrong.

The internet is slowly murdering innocent words, and my time online is slowly killing my ability to spell.

It's a shame, really.