I openly admit that I am that friend who constantly corrects others' grammar. I cringe when I see "your the best", "it's been to long", or one of the worst, "see you their". Of course, I'm a teenager too. My grammar and spelling are far from perfect. However I think the problem is not so much that our generation doesn't understand the differences between these words, but that applying them correctly is not our priority. Over time, and with help from technology, we have "dumbed down" the English language, and continue to do so.

             
We are the "generation of technology" for sure. Speed factors into many of our decisions. The question is not "how well?", but "how fast?", or "how soon?". Typing is faster than writing. Simplifying our spelling and eliminating "unnecessary" letters in our words are faster than writing correctly. Although I might flinch at a text reading, "c u 2nite," I see little harm in this, due to the casual atmosphere of the situation. But when we begin writing college essays, resumes, or speeches, a lot of our generation may be in a bit of a pickle. We are told that writing formally and correctly is what the generations before us expect, but we don't strive for this quality until  something as important as a college essay is the main focus.

             
Words naturally evolve over time. Otherwise, we would all be Tweeting, texting and Facebooking like Shakespeare. And the reasons for the words evolving are in fact the same that they are today. Simplifying and shortening words and sentences are all due to convenience and laziness. Long ago, words that were hard to pronounce sort of meshed together, creating a new word that meant the same thing, only they were shortened.  But social networking sites, especially Twitter, and technologies like texting and even e-mail, are the root of our generation's "dumbed-down" lingo. Twitter encourages shorter sentences and words with its 140-character maximum, and I've recieved texts with just a question mark, that I must assume is either "why?" "when?" "where?" "who?" "what?" or "how?" depending on the previous context. 

             
What many people look past are the long term effects of simplifying everything we say and write. Imagine the dictionary in ten years.  What if all we ever write are acronyms like "lol"? Or what if we decide that "there" means "there" "their" and "they're" because we can't be bothered taking an extra second to figure out which one we should use?  What will become of the English language then, if the language is just as simplified as it can get? Like many of my fellow classmates wrote in their last online journal regarding public schools and democracy, I also mentioned that what we are being taught will eventually become the basis of the future of our country. That being said, enforcing proper English, or even just the actual words themselves is a must. Without enforcement, the English language will only become more casual and informal. The generations to follow will simplify an already-simplified language to a scary extent.