The Future Of Language

I fear the English language is slowly deteriorating due to text messaging and social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook.
I am calling this now: Within 100 years, our language will have degenerated into an ugly hodgepodge of acronyms, shorthand and netspeak.

You see, people often forget that language is a rather fluid thing. It's constantly evolving. It wasn't until about the 18th century that the spelling of individual words even became standardized. New words and new definitions for words are constantly being added to our vernacular.

As words and their spellings become more widespread, they are often added to our dictionary. Our language follows us and not vice versa. Here are some examples:

• "Amuse" comes from the Latin root "muser", meaning "to stare stupidly". At one time to "amuse" someone meant not to entertain them, but to stupefy them.
• "Nice" comes from the Latin root "nescius" and originally meant something akin to "ignorant"
• "Artificial" originally meant "full of artistic or technical skill"
• (More examples)
  

Because of this, it is a very real possibility (and a very terrifying one) that in the future we will see "lol", "ily" or "noob" enter our dictionaries. We will see punctuation marks slowly grow out of common usage (The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has already eliminated the use of hyphens in many words)

As a wannabe poet, I've always attached a certain romanticism to language. I feel in it's proper written form, English is almost as beautiful as tits. This is why I make it a point to painstakingly enter every last apostrophe in every text message I send via cell phone. This takes me forever and people call me ridiculous for it, but I call them the cancer that is eating away at our language.

~Kyle