The heart of the Internet

For Valentine's Day this year, I decided to go all out. I put on a nice suit, took the girlfriend to a very pricey Italian restaurant and even got a bottle of champagne that I'll probably be paying off until graduation.\nAnd in the midst of this, over a delicious mousse dessert, she grabbed my hand, looked at me with her big beautiful brown eyes and said, "I heart you."\nOkay, no, not really. Hell, if she did that, she wouldn't have been my girlfriend by the time the check came, but there's still a heck of a lot of people out there who seem to think they can talk the way they do on the Internet in real life.\nI myself am guilty of this (probably because I hang out with too many people from http://thehoosierweb.com, an IU message board, and anyone who's a regular there knows I post way too much as well), but that doesn't make it any less annoying and something we shouldn't all try to avoid.\nFor heaven's sake, what does "I heart you" even mean? Do you pump blood for my circulatory system? Are you some kind of muscle? I just don't get it.\nThe whole sentence just reeks of something a 2-year-old would say, but in that case, he has an excuse -- he barely speaks English.\nIf you care for someone that much, just say, "I love you." Bastardizing such a common phrase only ensures that future generations will speak a poorer language.\nAnd the saddest part is just how likely that is. Language changes constantly, and slang is always being incorporated into it. The Oxford Dictionary considers "D'oh!" to be a word now, and http://dictionary.com defines "cromulent," a made-up word from an episode of "The Simpsons," as "fine, acceptable."\nIf "Simpsons" references can get into a dictionary, how much longer will it be until the people at Oxford accept the word "pwned" as well?\nToday people use many words Shakespeare created for his plays without batting an eye, and the Internet and its perversion of the English language is much more widespread now than the plays of Shakespeare were 400 years ago.\nBut in Shakespeare's case, he created words that didn't really have an equal. The language used on the Internet is just laziness. How much harder is it to write "owned" instead of "pwned?"\nI shudder to think what this might mean for the future of journalism, too. Here I am, spending thousands of dollars on becoming better writer, learning The Associated Press style and enduring endless hours of grammar assignments, yet I'll graduate only to find that I can get away with writing in leet speak. Imagine reading on the front page of The New York Times:\n"Today teh president pwned teh Democrat's tax proposal. Said teh 1337 prez: 'It was teh sux!!1' Democrats responded, "Oh noes!" and Senator Ted Kennedy proceeded to do his best impression of Bob Goatse."\nThe fact is, most of this stuff doesn't even mean anything and isn't very funny (except goatse -- the look on someone's face the first time they see it is priceless). \nA good rule might be that if you wouldn't put it in a term paper, don't actually let it pass through your lips.\nUsing the computer dialect in everyday conversation just makes you sound stupid to the majority of people, and if any of this garbage ever becomes acceptable outside of Internet message boards, I'm moving to Mexico to finally put all those Spanish classes to use. And I personally don't heart Mexico.\nI just pray I don't have some half-wit kid, who, when I die, decides to put "pwned" on my tombstone.