When I first discovered the Internets*, I was a big jerk about ASCII and stuff. I had a young man with whom I liked to flirtatiously instant message, and he was always sticking in little brbs and gr8s and things as jokes, and I would get all upset and say "ew" all the time to him. This disgust was entirely misplaced, as the young man was very eloquent and a good speller & was just having a laugh. But now I find myself in kind of an awkward position, which is that, while I dislike all the misspelling on the Internet (it's hard to read!), I much more dislike people whose "pet peeve" is misspelling on the Internet. I think the time has come on the Internet when people of a certain age & disposition can just avoid the really bad Internet spellers: most of them are pre-teens, after all, or subliterate pornographer-types, and you have no business skulking around either of those kinds of people.

That's why comments like this (on a message board I'm kind of ashamed that I read) are so irritating. This person is responding to another person's post where they said something about "inderstanding":

"Pardon me, but "inderstanding"? I assume your finger went to the right of the keypad a tad too much. :)"

Why is this person such a jerk? Has he or she never in his or her life made a typo? Why does he or she feel that it's necessary to make a little sarcastic comment? Also, the happy face does not mitigate anything. PS: I don't care if the "inderstanding" person was indeed mollified by the happy face & not insulted at all by the comment. The commenter is a BIG JERK.

Counterpoint: my boss just sent me an e-mail saying "Are you freer to come to a meeting in a few minutes"? And I was entirely on the point of saying, "Well, I'm freer, but not entirely free yet." But 1) I didn't, and 2) I think that's more okay than being like, "Freer? Looks like your finger strayed a tiny bit to the right when you were typing!!! Retard!!!!"

*Does making that joke make me a loser? Is that played out now? Probably. It's so difficult to be cool.