De omnibus dubitandum - everything should be questioned.

Since the creation of AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Unichat, etc., or whichever one of these wonderfully programmed means of communication via the Internet (which was then followed by the remaining programs mentioned, which somehow attracted users despite being identical to every other Messenger Service, simply with added features -- ooh, little poppy-uppy thingies that tell you when a friend signs on! Not that you couldn't hear the ear-pleasing door-creaking sound and not that you weren't perfectly capable of looking at the buddy list! Oh no, thank heavens the creators installed that brilliant feature -- but that is another story), a single entity -- no, I shall not acknowledge that being as human, for it has brought unspeakable doom upon us all -- has seemingly lost all traces of logic whatsoever, setting the trend for millions to come.

Oh, I cannot bear to name the horror this entity has maniacally created. It must be looking up at us right now, cackling with sinister delight.

Where does it live? What's that you say? Hell? What is this Hell you speak of?

That, my dearest friend, is a very poor joke indeed. For this bane lives on. It lives, thriving, in the forms of its followers. It is dangerous, yes indeed. It eats the pie from your windowsill, it steals the lead from your pencils, it steals babies in the night and devours them, it puts jell-o in your drinking water, etc. It is at fault for every occurrence imaginable. It will never die until the ignorance of mankind is banished from existence (ie, never).

The truth of the matter is, it lives in a much more dangerous, wicked place than mere Hell.

This fiendish, mortifying, indescribable terror is simply pure ignorance.
And it comes in the form of (in increasing order of scariness):
Pink font, excessive emoticons, "AIM Lingo", the question "sup" and all other forms of it, "337", misspellings of a word designed to look "kyoot", and sticky caps.

I may have missed several other evils of the online world. Sue me.

These terrifying forms of pure, malignant evil were born in the midst of the war for the world of Messenger.

Once, long ago, an AOL mastermind declared, "Let us make beautiful new options of colours for the people of AOL Instant Messenger," because, of course, the kindly and thoughtful rulers of the land of AOL wished to have more and more users, and eventually take over the world. And thus, annoying little girls with pink font over pink highlights that no one could possibly read were born. These cunning witches of pink have forsaken the normal colour spectrum. No, no, they were too beautiful, too perfect, too high and mighty for something as lowly as black, or blue, or even orange. These girls have set out on a quest to burn the retinas of everyone they converse with, with blinding electric pink fonts set on hot pink backgrounds, which they assure are entirely different shades of pink. Yet all who encounter them are instantly incapacitated by the shuddering beastly colour. No -- there was a time when pink was normal, when it was beautiful. But it was not to be. The little girls of pink font had ravaged the good name of pink forever.

Soon after the wonderful creation of colourful fonts, a tactician of MSN gasped, "Oh no, this won't do at all, however are we going to compete with those beautiful colours?" He thought, and thought and thought some more, because obviously the rulers of MSN were incapable of thinking, when the tactician declared, "Let us make beautiful, touching icons of emotions for the people of MSN Messenger," which were then rightfully dubbed "emoticons" by the Queen of MSN. And so the people rejoiced, conversing only with yellow, disproportional faces. Whole conversations would consist of only: ":-'( :-( :-/ :- :-\ :-) :-D." Yes, it was a grand idea indeed, to display emotions for those illiterate ones who could not adequately do so in words. And so, the Smiley People were born, never typing a word in their lives. Perhaps this grand idea once might have been considered good and holy, but alas, the goodness of emoticons has been long worn out by the Smiley People.

Unfortunately for the Queen of MSN Messenger and her people, AOL won the people of Messenger, and ruled Messenger for all eternity (even though we all know that MSN AIM). No one knows why, exactly. Urine-colour smiley faces were much more in favour by the people than forty-eight colours (half of them ugly, at that), but perhaps the fact was that MSN had foolishly forgotten the "Instant" that AOL slyly slipped into their name, thereby making the people believe MSN was not really an Instant Messenger and was actually an email service -- which it is, but the people got mighty confused by all that. All the other lands of Messenger were crap, and didn't really deserve to be mentioned anyways.

Now that AOL had won the battle over Messenger and enslaved all its people, the rulers had no further motivation to create new features that actually interested the people. In this way, the peoples' hands were forced, and they had to create features of their own.

Sadly, the people were equally as lacking in the creativity department as both AOL and MSN, and began to degenerate language itself in the form of "AIM Lingo" to satisfy their creating urges. "AIM Lingo" began to replace proper language, dragging English into the dregs of oblivion. It had a humble beginning with innocent abbreviations that aided all of Messenger -- handy little acronyms like "brb" or "g2g". All the people of Messenger loved those two acronyms and their creators (although those creators' names are forgotten in this day and age), and soon began to greedily desire the fame and fortune that came with inventing acronyms and shortcuts. The first few were successful, such as "lol" and "ttyl." Yet all of these inventions seemed to have made language difficult to understand at all, bringing into existence not-quite-sentences such as these: "i h8 skool u no?" Of course, not-quite-sentences such as these began to bring confusion upon the heads of many in the fair land of AOL Instant Messenger. Could "u no" mean you know, or could it possibly mean you don't? No one shall ever know. These not-quite-sentences began to usurp the roles of intelligent sentences, and from there, the language of AIM spiralled faster into its own downfall.

An old fashioned "Hello" as a greeting slowly descended into a usefully shorter version, "Hey," and from there into an even shorter version, "Hi." Another commonly used phrase, "What is happening?" shortened to "What is up?", a much cooler form. This then changed into "What's up?", a MUCH cooler form of "What is up?" and also conveniently shorter by one letter/symbol, which then branched off into variances of coolness: "Sup?", "Wazzup?", "Watsup?", "Wats^?", "Wassup?", and so on. Somehow, sup and hi's meanings merged together, and now people greet others with "Sup?" Yet, strangely enough, no one could invent an answer to this strange question, because, obviously someone needed to answer this greeting that was in the shape of a question. Thus, the acronym "nm" was created to satisfy answering the question. So, when asked "Sup?", the correct answer is "nm" no matter if something is happening or not. In fact, "nm" replaced "hi" as a reply greeting, therefore you should always greet people with "nm." The people of Messenger found the question of "Sup?" to be overall, annoying and pointless, yet cool to an extreme. So people continue using it to this very day, annoying the hell out of both parties of a conversation when the only appropriate answer is "nm." So, in this way, "What is happening?"'s meaning has vanished completely from the face of Messenger, and no one could ever know what was happening ever again.

In the world of Messenger, there has always been a rebellious sect of Hackers, notable for infiltrating the ruling class of Messenger and damaging the system of Instant Messaging. Many believe "337" to have evolved from the Hackers, a language of numbers and symbols. To the peoples' dismay, a young loser one day proclaimed, "All young losers, this day henceforth, shall speak in 337 because we have nothing better to do with our time!" "P343 0U7" is an example of the horrors these young losers can accomplish in their free time, slaughtering the words "Peace out" into a waste of five minutes. And so, young losers wielding the "337" led, still further, the plunging decline of English into ‘AIMness.’

Eventually, the girls of pinkness began to bore with pink -- no, they could never entirely bore of pink, to the peoples' disappointment -- and decided to flaunt and flourish their girliness in a different way. How, they wondered, could this be achieved? One day, the lead girl of pinkness was trying to type maybe, yet was so horribly uneducated that she typed instead, "mabii." All the girls of pinkness cooed in delight at this new discovery of cuteness, and began to misspell every word in the English language in order to look cute. Along with horrible misspellings, symbols galore entered the world of Messenger. They were always there, of course, but no one really explored the use of symbols until then. The tilde, ~, the asterick, *, and the carrot, ^, were the lead contenders of the symbols. Soon, writing became: " +~+~+bubble tea is sexxi`licious+~+~+," to name one of the less severe cases of misspelling, yet more severe case of symbols. The girls of pinkness lost all traces of intelligence in this last act and have left the English-speaking world forever to much of Messenger's delight. Unfortunately, the girls of pinkness continue to whisper strings of nonsense into innocent victim's ears, leaving no one at peace. No one was safe against their foul, illegible words.

Oh, but no, the girls of pinkness returned again, bringing forth another "feature," sticky caps, as they called it. The Queen of Pinkness announced to the world of Messenger, "In the world of Messenger, under the rule of AOL, we must now in order to be accepted, randomly make letters capital! inserts evil laughter here" The people of Messenger were horrified. No, no, it was not just. It was cruel and unusual, to force people to randomly capitalize letters. But indeed they did, casting away the laws of grammar to satisfy the girls' wickedness. "nO!" the people cried, "tHis iS hOrRiBle!!**" And so the girls of pinkness usurped the power of the rulers of AOL, reigning the world with fear and strength.

To this day, the people are enslaved, forced to read the ugly, unholy words of many: the girls of pinkness first and foremost, the Smiley People, the AIM Lingo Speakers, the word "Sup?” the young losers, and AOL.

This is the tale of the unspeakable evil that has plagued us all for years in the world of Messenger. It continues to plague us with pure idiocy, something we cannot stand for.

Yet, what is the motive for this? Why would people go out of their way to type something insanely long and illegible, other than for being morons? Surely not everyone could be a moron?

That, my friends, is my question to you.