i'm old...

... or so says my middle sister, who is 14. i'm also in shock and here's why.

for a couple of years now i've seen my little cousins, friends' siblings, nephews, etc. spell words in messenger nicknames or even short e-mails with mixed caps and small letters like this:

wAzZuP dUdE

and that's actually a very good example because the mixing of caps and small letters also involves misspellings and random agglutination and separation of words as in "wazzup."

however, i think the misspellings in spanish are way more severe than they are in english. they would write things like "television" as "telivishon" and things like "hello" as "wallooss".

it's very difficult to explain in english how this deformation of the language takes place in spanish but here is an example taken directly from fany's flog (which is also another shock to me, i explain below):

WoOLaSS GeNtE pSs K RoShIoO JEJE pSs IO AkI NOMaSS SuBiEnDOLE PiKa A fAnY WeNoO PsS lE FiRmAN bIN mOniTO OkAsS wEnOo.

i'm sure most spanish speakers will understand, even with the slang and the misspellings. for english speakers, i won't even bother translating. but it's crazy. many times these kids can't tell any more whether the way they write the word is the correct one or not. and i don't get how uncomfortable it should be for those kids to write mixing up small and cap letters. sErIoUsLy. and i can't understand why it would be cool to misspell words. is it the actual process of finding a creative way of fucking up a word that's cool enough and deviates as much as possible from the actual spelling yet it is still understandable? i don't know.

and this seems to me an unstoppable phenomenon that will change the spanish language like no other event ever before.

and my sister calls me old-fashioned, not en vogue.

puh-lease! me?

dead chinchilla, not feathers (thanks, perro).

please tell me if this is an exclusive phenomenon in mexico or if it happens in other spanish-speaking countries or amongst teenagers in other countries.

anyway, i kept browsing my sister's flog, where i found aberrations like the one above and others. for those of you who, like me, don't know what a flog is, let me explain -- because i can explain now. a flog is a fotolog, the latest trend among mexican teens (or at least kids in my sister's school in sAn NiKo). they upload pictures to a website relatively frequently and post greetings addressed to their classmates... even though they see each other every day and their circle of friends consists of only these other 10-12 friends who also send them greetings in their flogs. it's very weird. but it's cool.

however, there is an uncool part to it. these are 14-year-olds!!

iM n sHoK!