@QuantMech If I get into trouble, I’d want you in my corner. 
Being someone who tries to see the good in people is an admirable trait.
I am not too concerned about their writing style and think it’s unfair to peg them as insufficient writers (in addition to insufficient roommates!). These are tweets and emails - kids(and adults) write them fast, often on their phones and there are written knowing the grammar police are not monitoring. They may well have written a college essay that would knock your socks off - but an email or text to a friend? - not important to get the AP style book out…
this is one of several reasons that schools should have a single rooms. not sure why hospitals and colleges think doubles or triples are a good idea.
And it kind of like the airlines these days, squeezing more people into the same amount of space. No wonder we see so many roommate problems. Many colleges operate year after year with forced triples instead of it being a one-off “oops, were overenrolled this year” scenario.
when a person goes to college they are going to become a future engineer, doctor, whatever…not for a lesson in living with people. if you want that experience rent an apartment and put the 2 beds in the same room. that and schools with no AC are big pet peeves. when I went to college the first 6 weeks and the last 6 weeks of school were brutal a few times nearly dangerous. (but I digress) how can you sleep or study in a brick building that the inside temp was way up into the 90’s.
My D1 went to a school that had no AC in the dorms. It wasn’t that hot, but they had to leave the windows open at night and her allergies and asthma got worse than they had been in years during the fall ragweed season. We had to get her out of the dorms for the next year on a disability waiver because of asthma.
For northern schools, zobroward, no AC isn’t necessarily a huge deal.
As someone who lives north of Boston, I can say AC may only be needed a few weeks of the year, but it is really helpful during those times! For the most part, new dorms are being built with central AC (per what I’ve been told by the schools themselves) but it is very expensive to retrofit old dorms/buildings, so adding AC usually only happens during a major renovation. D2 goes to a school in PA and I’ve been amazed to see that so far the weather has been almost as hot (and sometime hotter) than in DC where D1 goes to school. D2 does NOT have AC and has mentioned how tough it has been to sleep at nights.
Sorry to bring this off-topic!
Indeed. So these emails reveal that when writing quickly and instinctively they gravitate to incorrect pronouns. Poor grasp of basic grammar.
I freely admit that I judge people who use incorrect pronouns, use lay/lie incorrectly, use an apostrophe to indicate “Look out, here comes an S!”, and so forth. I don’t judge them as people, but I do judge their education. I’m not talking about something as subtle as a split infinitive (a debatable “error” in the first place).
As “Ashly” said, “Sorry not sorry.” B-)
I used to agree with you, but I’m not so sure anymore. Lately I’m beginning to think that communications like texting among teenagers have the makings of a separate dialect of English with its own rules, like AAVE/eubonics or Southern slang. Just like a presidential candidate might naturally say “I ain’t got no …” when campaigning in the South even if they’d never say that in their normal lives.
Even very well educated people often speak in clauses and not grammatically correct sentences. If you ever meet anyone who naturally speaks in paragraphs you will definitely notice it. It’s not natural.
I am curious what a linguist like @dfbdfb has to say about this.
@Consolation – I guess it is fine to “judge” children or young adults who do not use mainstream grammar in casual settings (spoken or written), so long as you understand that everyone did not have access to the same educational opportunities growing up. Not everyone grew up in an environment where mainstream grammar was used in daily speech. So if their casual language reflects and betrays the milieu they grew up in, what are you “judging” them for? Not having the luck to be born into and grow up in a different environment that would have led them to “instinctively gravitate” toward different pronouns?
Believe me, I think it is important to master standard written English. But I certainly don’t judge people who didn’t grow up speaking it for not “instinctively gravitating” towards it!
OT, but both of my kids gripe about the lack of AC in their dorms for those few weeks when they really need it. My daughter told me of one hellish week at Wellesley her sophomore year, when she and her roommate grabbed some bedding and slipped into the air-conditioned science building to sleep for a few hours. They figured people would just assume they were babysitting experiments and needed to stay there all night.
Climate change is probably going to make northern dorms of the future think about putting in AC.
Out of curiosity, are kids allowed to put in window A/Cs? We could at son’s UG.
The shared rooms came from a time when children even in upper-class rooms commonly shared bedrooms growing up.
In fact, some boarding schools such as Groton during FDR’s time there had headmasters who forbade private rooms for students as they felt “excessive privacy” was bad for one’s moral/character development during childhood through teen years.
There was also the factor that some parents…especially fathers felt during periods when the military draft was in place that shared rooms was good preparation for the expectation of living in tight quarters…such as sharing a sleeping area with dozens of other conscripts in boot camp.
The increasing desire for single rooms even for first/second year students as a “necessity” rather than a perk to look forward to in one’s junior/senior year has only come up within the last 2-3 decades.
Also, even American doubles/triples would seem a luxurious perk to my parents or older relatives who attended college in East Asia as the common dorm accommodation was packing 6-8 students into a room the size of a small American double. And the room was limited to two rows of bunk beds, a long narrow table, and a rack of small locker-sized closets for all their possessions.
Such dorms were still commonly in Mainland China as late as the '90s…though I’ve heard both have substantially spruced up dorm accommodations since.
While uncomfortable at times, dorms with no a/c is doable in the NE/Northern Midwest. Even if one was accommodated during the summer as I was while taking summer classes at an elite U. Just leave the windows open and spend as much time outside of one’s dormroom during the day.
Then again, I also managed to live for 5+ years without a/c in various post-college apartments due to concerns over age of building’s electrical setup and more importantly, the fact neither my roommates nor yours truly desired to pay for the uptick in our shared electric bill. We survived.
Not at my college. and I think that is pretty standard in colleges with older dorms. Portable AC’s would no doubt overwhelm the wiring.
As it is, students younger than the 10th grade live is rooms with many many beds, with cubicle-type partitions separating groups of 2 beds, I suspect that the student in question would not have adapted well in that environment. 
@al2simon I have read a number of articles on the topic of texting language recently. Among other insights I have gleaned, the use of correct grammar (and lack of emojis) is considered to be stuck up, unfriendly, arrogant, take your pick.
I’m too old to change my grammatical preferences, but I have adapted to the use of emojis. My kids think it’s cute, in a retro mom sort of way. 
The dorms at my LAC and at the elite college where I took summer classes forbade installing ACs.
And in the latter case, that applied even in the summer unless you were able to obtain a doctor’s note justifying a medical need for one. And it seemed they were rarely ever given when I attended.
Incidentally, residential housing at my LAC had some pretty contradictory rules regarding electrical appliances. We were allowed to have small dorm fridges…but no microwaves*.
- In practice, many undergrad classmates secretly had them on the D/L with a bit of a wink and a nod from our RAs.
At both my kids’ colleges most dorms had no A/C and you had to get a doctor’s note if you wanted it.
I guess we got lucky. Son’s taciturn roommate took one look at the a/c, and dropped his Computer focus to put the a/c in window. I had bought duck tape, just… When son arrived, it was going. Rooms with windows a/Cs were highly desirable for next years room selection.
@notelling, as I very specifically stated (emphasis added):