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"Business are open?" They say "truth is the first casualty of war." I don't know about that -- and I don't know who they are -- I'm Canadian -- a nationality equivalent to low-impact aerobics. "War" is a great song I grew up hearing on the radio. I can, however, vouch for the fact that spelling is often the first casualty of technology, A good example, aside from the above LED sign, which is "Too Good To Be Forgotten" (2G2B4G in SMS text-speak), is the old 1990s eight-dot-three file naming convention in the Windows operating system. People learned to strip the vowels out of file names they were creating, and put them back in file names they were reading, so Windows98,doc became "wndws98.doc." Sounds like fun, huh?

One day I woke up to the notion that I was doing with file names the same thing that a lot of ancient, so-called, Near Eastern peoples had done with their written languages. Ancient Hebrew, for just one of many examples, was written without vowels. I saw how this could have been a very deliberate, and very useful form of file compression, particularly for a nomadic people who carried their library with them. We were all about file compression back in the 1990s.

Later on, I was shocked (I really was) to realize that pedestrian crossing signs had always read "DONT WALK," with no apostrophe. The shock was I'd never noticed, and it hadn't mattered -- I'd read it as "DON'T WALK," and so had everyone else.

All my adult life technology has been doing this -- eroding the need for literacy -- now, many people couldn't even spell that word without Google. Now, pedestrian signs use pictures. I know my sensitivity to sloppy spelling (particularly my own) is outdated. Unfortunately, I CANT help myself.