Is our reliance on new technologies weakening our grip on the English language? With e-mail, text messaging, and countless other ways to do whatever it is you do faster, “dumbing down the language is not only seen as acceptable, but is tacitly encouraged as the status quo. Any number of my acquaintances excuse the bad writing and atrocious punctuation that proliferates in e-mail by saying, in essence, ‘Well, at least people are writing again.’ Horse droppings. People have never stopped writing, although it’s reaching a point where you wish a lot of them would.”