A fellow on the pipe-hobbyist message board I frequent is from Taiwan. His written English is essentially classroom-fluent: some unconventional syntax, not much idiomatic phrasing, but otherwise flawless spelling, grammar, and usage... with one exception. When writing "you," he consistently substitutes "u."

At first I thought of this as a blame-the-Internets affectation, but it seems strange that there'd be one and only one such instance. His capitalization, for example, is correct and standard. After considering this conundrum for a while, I cooked up a theory: the gentleman has learned a character-based language all his life, and in such there is a tendency to simplify as long as clarity is maintained. SMS and Internet shorthand have trained the world to read 'u' as the second-person pronoun, whether or not we write it longhand, so as character logic goes, it's on limits: not a substitute, but the same word.

All of which is to say: the utopians and/or cynics who think we're moving towards a character-based language may be onto something. It just might be that our characters evolve from letters rather than pictograms. In 200 years, will we be reading and writing something that looks like a cross between Shavian and L33T?

I want to give a big shoutout to my girl Death, for taking me long before I ever have to see that possibility realized.