Prolly? Is anyone else bothered by this and other english/grammar butchering?

I detest the "stupidification" of English that I've seen over the past 15 years or so. Texting when not using a phone, spelling becoming optional, homonyms being used indiscriminately, grammar being treated as an annoyance. People don't seem to realize that the sole purpose of language is to communicate ideas, and obfuscating your language is a hindrance to communication. It may be cute to call a surfeit of apples "two many" or "to many", but sometimes, due to context, one can only make a vague guess as to meaning.

I see too many people using idioms they can't possibly understand, since they're using words that sound something like the words in the idiom, but are meaningless in context. Mixed tenses, mixed persons, completely incorrect words ... I won't fault a foreigner for speaking English improperly - my grammar and usage in the few other languages I can keep from starving in is probably painful to the native speaker, but if you were born here, and learned English as your first language, at least speak and write it properly. Typos are one thing, but wasting your time (and everyone else's) writing something that makes no sense gains you nothing.

That said, language is a living, evolving thing. Shakespeare would have trouble understanding the best current English speaker, and Chaucer "prolly" (sorry, couldn't resist) would have considered our speech to be in some foreign tongue. In a few hundred years, the language you're complaining about will probably be considered ancient and stilted, and proper English even more outdated.

That doesn't mean that I like the trend, though.

(BTW, sloppy writing in informal situations isn't just something you can slough off when you need to - it's indicative of the sloppy thinking behind it, and persists even in job applications. And since when is "and" an article, as in "I have and answer to your problem".

@Jhon S:

No, that's not why. English is my mother tongue, I take pains to speak it properly, and I can't understand it either, except to think that some people have no pride. Then again, when the leader of the free world takes lessons in "speaking improperly", what can you expect of others? (Bush didn't grow up sounding like he just came in from a trail drive in 1845.)

It doesn't bother me much seeing it in a place like here or myspace etc. As long as each person makes themself understood to others.

There is a time and place to write certain ways, proper or not. Like someone shouldn't write "prolly" on a job application.

It would bother more if it were written that way in a love letter to me, like "we will prolly spend the rest of our lives together" lol.

Yes, me...I hate 'prolly' , 'would of' , 'could of', 'should of', 'how can I loose weight', 'dose anyone no'.... these and more. It makes me think that many English people are semi-literate in their own language.

As a wise man once said " English is a fine language,pity it's wasted on the English." (or words to that effect)

Sure, it would annoy me a lot if I found it somewhere it shouldn't be - in a formal situation, for example.

However, it's just short hand/text language/abbreviation/slang, or whatever you want to call it. Slang has existed as long as language itself has. It's constantly changing, and it doesn't do any harm at all, as long as it's kept where it should be, and yahoo answers seems to me a perfectly reasonable place to use slang.

OMG! WTF R U w8tin 4? The world has become a world of shorthand because everyone is in a hurry to do absolutely nothing. I think the text generation is here to stay, and the written word will never be the same. I have no problems with it, methods of communication change throughout history and will continue to do so.

as a guy who doesn't have english as native language it really irritates me when people say "there" instead of "their" I don't understand how can people do something like that, again, I don't have english as mother language so maybe that's why it's diffficult for me to find any sense to people who do that.

I hate...."thur" "U" "rly" "you're instead of your" the wrong "too" and I hate when people use the wrong there.

I correct people all of the time. Don't feel bad at all. Its our language. Its not much, so we should at least speak it correctly.