hyperbole at its finest...

AOL-speak is destroying language's beauty

Don't be asinine.  AOL-speak, though crude and annoying, has nothing to do with the ability of young persons to communicate (or rather, their inability.)  If you want to know why they can't communicate, try looking at their english and literature classes.  What "AOLSpeak" amounts to is the typed equivalent of a linguistic phenomenon known as code-switching, and anyone who's ever conversed with their peers in a manner differently than you'd speak in a board meeting is guilty of it.  The disconnect occurs because students aren't recognizing the status of email recipients--they perceive that all receivers are part of the same cohort, in other words.  They're making the assumption that because someone uses email they're part of a particular peer group conversant in this language of abbreviations.  This, in my mind, is a failure of the educational system, not a breakdown in the english language itself.

When someone emails you, texts you, or IM's you using crap english, call them on it.  If you're an english teacher and you accept written assignments of any kind with abbreviations like "ur", you ought to be run out of school on a rail.  But for pete's sake, don't make a mountain out of a molehill.