Maybe it鈥檚 the writer in me.

Or maybe it鈥檚 because 鈥淪ee Spot run!鈥� burst into my consciousness with a mind-numbing revelation: the letters we had practised over and over and over again prior to opening that first Dick and Jane book had meaning beyond the 鈥減enmanship鈥� that no teacher was ever able to drill into me.

Letters could be used to form words to convey thoughts directly from someone else鈥檚 mind into mine.

I didn鈥檛 know who had written the 鈥淪ee Spot run!鈥� that had so electrified my brain, but I could read his mind. (Or hers. We were trained to assume anyone with a thought worth sharing was a him, unless there was absolute identification that included a Miss or a Mrs. There was not yet even a Ms possibility back then.)

What I didn鈥檛 know yet, at my tender age, was that I could read that mind because of the precision with which the letters had been formed into words that precisely conveyed an intended meaning.

Soon after, I learned how spelling and punctuation 鈥� and later still, specific grammatical constructs 鈥� enhanced that precision and facilitated greater clarity in the sharing of thoughts and feelings through the written word.

And it wasn鈥檛 just Spot who could run. A person with a pen or pencil or typewriter could make anyone 鈥� or anything 鈥� run, simply by combining the rules, some words, and a dollop of imagination.

That鈥檚 how water runs from a tap.

It鈥檚 how your nose runs with a cold.

It鈥檚 how a car runs and a house can get run down.

It鈥檚 how a moderately clever brain can build a running gag.

It鈥檚 also how Facebook and its Internet cousins can run a language into the ground.

Who cares about capital letters at the beginning of a sentence? Who cares about capital letters anywhere? Who cares about which letters belong to which words?

And commas what鈥檚 the point of them anyway if you can write things that some people can understand even if its convoluted and isn鈥檛 in the rules and dont actually make any sense and if they wont understand thats there problem not mine.

The paradox of social media is that we can now communicate almost instantly with anyone anywhere in the world鈥� while our ability to communicate is running headlong into a wall of imprecision that threatens to make our communications meaningless.