Well, that's all gone to shit. After reading Atwood's tweet: "even Hungarians are not using hungarian notation any more."[sic] -- I got to thinking. People have stopped writing properly. I know what Hungarian Notation is, sillies. And I know it's has nothing to do with grammar or spelling things right. But then, few things today have to do with proper spelling. And I'm not talking about English, either. I'm talking about mother tongues. The beautiful ones, with funny letters and groovy sounds. Languages will tildes,breves, carons, cedillas, circles and other diacritics. Those are the ones I'm talking about. They're not dying. Their writing is. The process itself is called Romanization. It basically means that you can only use the letters found on standard qwerty keyboards plus a few French-ish letters. The Romanians have long adopted this trend. Now, most of our online writing would sound funny if read out loud and with no interpretation. The Hungarians too have fallen to this group. It's understandable, since their letters are damn funny and tough to type. The Dutch, too. Their cosmopolitanism is what caused that stroked out o to vanish from the online. And the French? Well, they've been eager to leave all those damn accents behind since the day they were forced to start using them. The Ruskies, zhe Germans, the Norse and the Asians have yet to be Romanized. And that's good! It makes inter-cultural communication a bitch, but it's well worth it. People will have to study, translators will be hired, eyes will be pleased. That's what the Japanese say when they're asked why they don't switch to the Latin charset: 'Ours is so damn prettier!' Granted, adding the special letters is cumbersome, at best. And sometimes, the wrong letters are added. Sometimes we're just too lazy to switch between keyboard layouts. Sometimes, money gets printed with the wrong diacritics because of bad character support on Macs. Some bastards will write in English because they just feel like it. Whatever our excuse is, it stands. But we're still on a very slippery slope. And yeah, Jeff Atwood's twitter account is @codinghorror. A must-follow for any developer.