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If you have known me for awhile, you’ll know I’m an impeccable speller. At least I used to be. Yes, I’ve lost some neurons and can’t always remember how to spell things, and have even caught the “I’m staring at this word thinking it looks really weird” bug every once in awhile. But something alarming has been happening to me lately. It started when I was trying to be ‘cool’ when IMing with my nieces and nephews…a ‘kewl’ here and a ‘wot’ there (and have even been known to speak a lil’ LOLspeak).

Then, I joined Twitter, exacerbating my penchant for creative spellings. Twitter is a way to communicate with your friends (and the world, if you like) via ‘Tweets’ which are 140 character descriptions of what you’re doing or what you want to share (their tagline used to be ‘It sounds like the most ridiculous thing until you try it.’) Anyway, Twitterers, as we like to be called, often have to shorten their words to fit a sentiment into 140 characters. This can be challenging, as you can imagine. So, for example, if I wanted to shorten the last two sentences, I’d do this: “Anyway, Twitterers, as we like 2 B called, often have 2 shorten words 2 fit sentiments into 140 char-This can B challnging, as u can imagine” 140 characters exactly, without losing (much) meaning. This is all well and good, but I get used to this, and my brain isn’t always sharp enough to turn this off when I’m sending email, ESPECIALLY to one of my twitter friends. I’ve been using ‘ur’ instead of ‘your’…’lol’ and emoticons interspersed…strong urge to use BTW…using too many ellipses…(notice that I also stopped putting spaces in my ellipses…the sign of a twitterer, always shortening).

My question is, will these shortened spellings become the norm? I know some people who do a spell check by entering the proposed spelling of a word into google (see ‘googlitis’ in the Sniglet 2.0 post). With Twitter updates being indexed by Google, does this mean our spelling will now be crowdsourced? In other words, will the spelling of words be dictated by how the majority of people are spelling them, and thus shortened/simplified? Or will we be saved by our auto-corrects and spell checkers, which will keep the ‘correct’ spelling of each word and keep us honest? Time will tell…will be interesting to see if our language evolves (or devolves ;).