#HashtagWars

In a galaxy far, far away, there was a phenomenon known as the hashtags. Most of the citizens in this strange world saw this as a dawning of a new era! The movement of the hashtags rapidly increased across the globe. Forcing the panel of highly esteemed literary experts to all agree and formally include the '#' hashtag symbol as an actual definition in the dictionaries.

There was one person (who, she was certain, wasn't the only one) who was determined to rebel against this phenomenon...

Okay, so I realize we aren't in a galaxy far, far away. But sometimes it really feels like it! I was SHOCKED when I discovered that the meaning for 'hashtag' had been formally introduced into not only one but a few different dictionaries.

That is basically like we are promoting the younger generations to use "txt lngo" in their everyday life.
I watch my younger siblings and cousins (and even just very few hashtag enthusiast friends) all day everyday, hashtag almost everything.

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate hashtags per say, but I don't understand their purpose in life either.
That could also be because they started on twitter (I believe) and I don't twitter.

I was okay with Twitter trying to branch out and be unique. They wanted to have their own culture that would permanently set them apart from Facebook, and Instagram. Twitter, as I see it, is a mixture of the two. So introduce the hashtags, and their social media forum had taken on new heights.
And I was perfectly fine with that.

Until hashtags started following people over to facebook, instagram, and literally every other form of media. Both online, and not online!
It's everywhere. Like a virus that has spread.

Yes, some strong wording there... No I still don't hate it. I just find it useless.
And then came the day when my sister posted something on facebook. Her post, was literally 4 words.
with 12 hashtags that followed.

Now my older brother and I decided to take matters into our own hands. She does lots of hashtags, but for this instance the hashtags were not only repetitive and therefore redundant, they were exactly 3 times longer than her original post!

Now normally I don't interfere with people's hashtags, but this was serious. If you're going to hashtag, at least have them make sense, and don't (for the love of all that is good) be repetitive. If you're expecting people to actually read your hashtags, then making hashtags that are so similar that you're basically being a broken record, is going to make us lose interest.
Just saying.

So anyways, like I said, my brother and I decided to do a hashtag war, waged on my unsuspecting sister, and continued even long after she had gone to bed!

It was great fun, especially for me (because I am such a trouble maker) and my brother finds hashtags even more annoying than I do!

Here was how it turned out. Please enjoy our sporadically clever, but mostly just fun teasing replies to her post.

Bro:  #nomorefbhashtags
Me: Can I hashtag that??
Me: #idontunderstandthepointofhashtags
Lil' Sis: ... WOW guys, lol! Hashtag war!
Lil' Sis: ... Oops, I didn't mean war... I feel stupid... (she felt bad because my brother and I have a history of not always getting along.)
Bro: Hey Lil' Sis, we grew up in a world where a hash tag was the number sign on a phone. Typically it would get pressed most after entering a voicemail password. Ha ha.
Me: #oldschool
Bro: #stopdoingthat
Bro: #please
Me: #ohsorry!
Me: #illstopnow
Lil'Sis: #lolyouguysmakemelaugh
(So at this point I was hanging out with a friend who is a band geek, and coincidentally my sisters post had been a band post. So my friend helped me crack a band joke that I didn't understand at all...)
Me: Wow Lil' Sis, SHARP words!
Lil' Sis: LOL!!
Bro: #sorrynotsorry
Me: #youcanteachanolddognewtricks
Me: #hashtagsshouldstayontwitterwheretheybelong
Me: #imdonenow
Me: #brotherwillyouforgiveme?
Me: This has to be my most favorite comments/ conversation I have ever seen!
Bro: # viva la revolution. # see what I did there?
Me: #hashtagwars
       #thiscouldgoonforawhile
Bro: # you promised you'd stop
       # lol
Me: #youredoingitwrong
       #ijustcalledmyvoicemailbyaccident
       #toomanyhashtags
Bro: # on purpose. # viva la revolution step 1
Me: And this all stemmed from one incomplete sentence. Hmm...
       #youknowyourehavingfun
       Oh! Now I see what you did there. It took me a minute
Me: # viva la revolution
Bro: So I'd say it's hashtag YOU'RE doing it wrong.
       Calling your voicemail...
Me: Ha ha nice. Thanks Bro.
Me: Hey I did say right at the start that I don't understand the purpose of hashtags. I think that implies that I don't know how to do it correctly.
Bro: So many notifications for tiny sister tomorrow.

(at this point we'd been going back and forth with the #hastagwars for almost an hour after Lil' Sis had gone to bed!)

Me: # text lingo required.
       Lol yes, I wonder how long we can go on for?
Bro: And look at us tweet tards by the end of the status.
Me: # most comments on a picture/ post ever?
Bro: #we'regetting old.
Me: Ha ha ha! #tweettards
Bro: Grammar kills the hashtag, go figure...
Me: #calledit!
       #textlingo
       #sorry  I meant #txtlngo
       #just killed some brain cells...
       #you're rebuttal?
Bro: *Many
       But we did it together ha ha.
       #teamwork
Me: ha ha #this is fun!
       We should do #hashtagwars more often!
Bro: I'm not so sure about that, but destroying Lil Sis's statuses after her #bedtime or #anytime
Me: yes #agreed  what should we call this madness?

(I think at this point he had either gone to bed and left me to my own devices, or got fed up with the hashtag war.)
Me: I feel like looking up and seeing what the history of the hashtag is... #nerdiness
Me #foundit
Me: "A hashtag is a work or an unspaced phrase preficed with the hash character, #, to form a label. It is a type of metadata tag. Words or phrases in messages on microblogging and social networking services such as Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Twitter,  or VK may be tagged by entering # before them. 1. either as they appear in a sentence or 2. appended to it. The term hashtag can also refer to the hash symbol itself when used in the context of a hashtag.
A hashtag allows grouping of similarly tagged messages, and also allows an electronic search to return all messages that contain it.
Because of it's widespread use, the word, hashtag,  was added to the Oxford English dictionary in June 2014.

Me:...
Me: #thatsjustsad

So that was our crazy first episode of the hashtag wars. Who knows if there will be a second one. I may not cling to it as much as I did then, purely because I enjoyed the irony of it all.
Although, after the first 3 hashtags that I wrote I found myself getting irritated because I couldn't type properly. Not to mention that we were both surprisingly unsurprised that grammar killed the hashtag.

But how remarkably sad that grammar, and spelling are now being encouraged by the oxford dictionary. Because in order to properly hashtag, you can't have spaces or any accentuating marks for grammar.
That's almost like legalizing Marijuana because "everyone does it". Oh wait...

If we thought that society now of days had an issue with people in my 20's generation having poor grammar (and even text lingo on resume's) now, imagine in 15 or so years when the hashtag generation gets there?

I am sure I'm not the only one out there who feels this way. But I am also that person who loves the Jane Austen or even Shakespear generation of writing and authors. That time era, and the ones they reference in their writing, I find fascinating. Because words held more meaning, which is why there are so many words in the English language. Words held more meaning and properly portrayed the exact emotions that the speakers felt. The language is beautiful and flows, and no one talks like that anymore.
Instead of "Fair thee well" upon departure, which means not only farewell, but to take care at the same time, we have kids texting and saying "g2g". They are learning to look down at an impassive screen, and they don't call to learn social skills. And they aren't learning proper grammar.

But that is an entirely different rant altogether!

We literally have hand held devices that can access the wealth of all knowledge and information, and what do we use it for? To tweet our lunch and look up pictures of cat's all while saying "#cute" or "#delish!".

I don't have kids, but I do have a nephew and younger siblings, so I must implore of you...

Stop the hashtags!

# viva la revolution!

Hopefully you enjoyed #hashtagwars episode 1!