When I actually went to college, my English professor refused to recognize contractions (you know, can't instead of can not) as proper English. His reasoning was that contractions were born out of improper use of language that became so common that now it's widely accepted. Although I was pissed off at him when he marked my accidental contractions with red ink, I now recognize his way of thinking.
Correct grammar and spelling are incredibly important to me, but it doesn't mean I'm any good at it, though. Thank God I'm living in the age of word processing, though it is disheartening to mangle a word so thoroughly that spell-check either suggests words that are not even remotely close, if there are any suggestions at all (like when I misspelled "thoroughly" writing this sentence, in fact). There are many grammar things that the computer cannot help you with that I've tried to pick up through my writing; if you read my blog posts in chronological order, you can almost pick up exactly where I discovered the semi-colon. I still have so much to learn.
Which brings us to our current age of intentional misspelling. The granddaddy of all this is, of course, Z in the place of S. Boyz, Girlz, it all drives me fuck nutty. For a short time it seemed like "i" for "y" ("Boi") would surpass its popularity, but the "z" still holds strong.
Using numbers in lieu of letter(3 instead of E, ect) has the benefit of being both stupid and confusing, thankfully it doesn't seem to be catching on; it might be because it's easier to just use the real letters when you're chatting online or texting. Which brings me to..
The contractions of texting -l8r,LOL and the like- which blends elements of all of these linguistic peeves and may prove longer lasting for the same reason that regular contractions have; they make life easier. Each spared keystroke puts the eventual case of Carpel Tunnel Syndrome that much further away. It creates a kind of technological snobbery with it's own lexicon that seems hopelessly obtuse to a budding curmudgeon like myself.
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