John Zeitler

The Think B4 U Speak (and this really deserves the scare quotes) “campaign”, while basically doomed to failure from the very beginning, has its heart more or less in the right place. The primary problem is actually very simple, once you understand one very important thing.

Howard Phillip Lovecraft once described a sound so horrific, so mind-bendingly alien that it could not, by sane men, be considered speech. The sound of wet flesh smacking tonelessly and arrhythmical, moistened by spittle and foam from the gaping maws of things once human but no longer, is the psycholinguistic equivalent of a Dremel applied directly to the forebrain: it is intended to convey a message which is as nonverbal as it is unambiguous. But this foul resonance is no mean fiction.

Lovecraft wasn’t describing the fell chants of R’lyeh. He was describing the chatter in an online match of, well, anything.

When you consider that the homophobic, racist, and other various unpleasant verbiage slung like plasma bolts across the internet are in essence the equivalent of the unintelligible screaming and gibbering of, for lack of a better description, monkeys– when you realize it’s not a deliberate slinging of slime, but a reflexive scream of primal fury from people who should know better but don’t have the presence or force of mind to control themselves– well, I think that pretty much says everything there needs to be said about it.

Except that there’s a convenient setting to allow voice only from friends on Xbox Live, and for the love of all things holy and a few things that aren’t, PLEASE USE IT. That way the apes can scream into the void or with their ilk, and the actual human beings can go about having a fun game or two.