The YouTube Comment Snob and the Elitists Who Love It

We all know that the internet is riddled with those who think grammar, capitalization and punctuation is an outdated and unnecessary art form. These individuals are often looked down upon by grammar snobs as being unintelligent neanderthals who chisel out thoughts with nothing more than grunts and moans. This attitude has brought about a near limitless number of complaints from snobbish message board users and has even brought about a new Mozilla Firefox add-on aptly named the “YouTube Comment Snob,” and those air-nosed grammar elitists are rallying behind it.

In all fairness, the YouTube Comment Snob is actually a pretty useful application. If there are certain online linguistic features you can’t stand, like all caps or lack of punctuation, the program sorts out comments in the YouTube comment threads and blocks those that meet the negative criteria you set. I have an issue with this, but it doesn’t lie in the application itself, but rather the group of people who are praising it as though it were the “second coming.”

As a writer, and someone who has a perpetual stiffy for the written word, you might think that I would be on board with these nit-pick craved snobs, but I think their attitude is simply flawed. Sure, “LOL” might be an overly simplistic way of saying “I found that amusing,” but it still gets the message across which, correct me if I’m wrong, is the entire purpose of language.

When I installed the YouTube Snob, I checked out some of my favorite YouTube videos and found that the comments that weren’t blocked were just as unintelligible and pointless as those that were, they just weren’t as visually abrasive. So while some might believe this filtering system ensures that thoughtful, intelligent conversation will thrive in an otherwise void, unintelligible wasteland, the truth is that a person (or online poster) who is less articulate is not, by default, stupid.

I firmly believe that this notion of poor syntax being indicative of poor thought is just foolish. We speak and write to express our opinion to those around us. While a phrase like: “That was an excellent video and I laughed whole heartedly” is fine and good, “ROFLMAO” works just as well, and is actually faster to type. Sure, it might not be easy on the eyes, and if you personally don’t like reading it, go ahead and download the YouTube Comment Snob. But if you’re just some private-schooled grammatical fascist, get down off your soapbox. Just because you can recite Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style doesn’t mean you’re a smarter human being. Besides, who reads comments on YouTube anyway?

Please send all hate mail to graham@gotgameu.com and I’ll be happy to edit it for you.