On Fri, 30 May 2008 16:03:20 -0500, Lion-O <nosp@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said :
>I wonder when parents will actually start /raising/ their kids again.
I think modern day parents spend more quality time with their kids
than in my day. They seem kinder to their kids. You never see
parents smacking their kids today. Public tantrums seem rare too.
Contraception has helped keep kids from being born to parents who
don't like kids or who are busy for them.
Mothers in my day spent more time in the home cooking and cleaning. In
my day kids were totally free to wander over about a mile from home
base, most of the time unsupervised. Today, parents are so terrified
of strangers, they sit on their kids like mother hens. We pitied a
pair of girls back then whose parents treated them like China dolls,
protected by being confined to their yard.
On other paw, I see some kids today who are socially feral, having
being raised by being dumped in front of a TV or a violent video game.
Putting on my old codger hat, one of the things that bothers me about
young people, and sometimes otherwise quite intelligent young people,
is their complete inability to spell and construct grammatical
sentences. How on earth are these people to be treated seriously as
adults? Will this mean the end of standard English as quaint?
Texting and textspeak has been the greatest assault on the English
language since the Norman invasion.
see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/textspeak.html
In contrast, the changes in spelling and punctuation instituted by the
American revolutionaries were consciously designed to increase clarity
and consistency to make the language easier to learn for immigrants.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
The Java Glossary
http://mindprod.com
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