Jeremy complains about the changes in the every day usage of the English language we have seen with the growth of the Internet. All those phrases like ur, ru, lapses in punctuation.. everything in lower case (okay, I'm guilty of that one myself) etc.. etc..
Yes! My [insert your favourite deity] is that annoying! I've seen some of my very intelligent and otherwise wonderful friends lapse into this teenagish (is that a word?) and infuriating habit.. Makes me want to reach out, grab their cell phones, blackberries, palm pilots and other assorted keyboardless devices and throw them into the nearest west-nile-virus-mosquito infested swamp.
I blame those devices. Anyone who has ever attempted to have a meaningful text-based conversation via a cell phone will agree with me here.. After all, it takes fewer key-pushes to type out 'ur' than 'you are'.
I'd like to also add 'LOL' is just not funny and too reminiscent of early 90s AOL chat rooms. If you'd like to express emotion.. use the language our forefathers developed! (okay, *your* forefathers, mine developed Polish). "Oh, that was funny" takes more typing, but it'll sit better with me at least. I'm a fast typist, I suppose that makes it easier for me to type out a whole sentence instead of a silly acronym.. but the first time someone catches me using LOL, ROTFL or a similar atrocity, please smack me. I'll thank you later when sanity returns.
Of course, those complaints are not enough to finish off this little rant. A friend of mine, who is otherwise very intelligent and sane called something 'gay' the other day. 'That is soo gay'.
*bang* *bang* *bang* <--- the sound of me banging my head on my desk.
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I personally agree with the camp saying that you should type it out and the abbreviations look like crap. However I do like using them to express emotion. Although that's something that I would never do on a school paper...
#I dunno. The whole issues sounds kinda gay.
#Making mental note not to use LOL when IMing with Kasia, then rolls eyes and walks away.
However, I do cringe when the spoken word is pulverized. "I don't got it", "I brung it wit me" "Nuttin'" are a few phrases I despise.
I have never understood why people have told me to "bring it inside" when it's been so obvious that I was inside, and they've meant for me so take something into another room. "Bring it upstairs" - what's with this "bring", I bring it to you, but take it someplace else, that's the way I learned it my English Language class.
Sorry a tad off topic, but an opportunity to moan.
#I hate it when people can't get punctuation right.
Why be so damn stingy on the ellipsis? Use the third dot
#I heard someone say print(ing presses) freeze(s) language.
The language of the year 1300 was barely comprehensible to
those alive in 1400, and yet we, 500 years later, can read and
understand what was written in the year 1500. I heard someone
else say (well, I probably read it) that our modern, 'frozen'
language sounds stuffy and archaic, full as it is of
constructions and conventions that have little to do with what
people are actually experiencing, and everything to do with
what happened to become embedded in the icy matrix at the
moment language froze.
Think, in the Bay Area, where I live, 200 years ago the people
on one side of the Bay could not understand people on the
other. Within 100 miles there were dozens of dialects. In the
Niger Delta there are some 200 dialects/languages.
Look at a map of the US, from the Mississippi east that shows
counties: why are they all 15 miles from edge to center? Why
such uniformity, regularity in the areal layout of governing
units, why that particular scale? 15 miles is a days walk,
and this was the scope of 95% of the population's existence.
In 1776, Philadelphia had 50,000 inhabitants. 95% of the
seaboard's population were subsistence farmers whose economic
and cultural destinies had nothing to do with anything more
than a days walk distant. It took weeks to cross the
Atlantic, a distance of a few thousand miles. It could take
weeks to get from New York to Boston, too. It was easier for
Bostonians to talk to London than to Charleston. Isolation
bred accent, dialect, patois, language. Print was only
beginning to fix it into one shape.
Fantastic linguistic and cultural diversity was the rule for
the millenia that preceded the last few hundred years.
Shakespeare happened to be around when the ice was just
setting, and he, like the people around him, was more
accustomed to an atmosphere where invention in daily speech
was the rule.
Now, late in the industrial era, we live in the time of
wholesale death of languages. In One River Wade Davis says
"At one time there were thousands of cultures around the world
and probably as many as fifteen thousand languages, each like
a flash of the human spirit. Today perhaps six thousand are
still spoken...'More than half are gone,' I said. 'In a
century only a few hundred will remain, a few hundred out of
thousands.'"
The web is a new chapter -- the capital intensive,
broadcast-oriented, highly centralized, copy-right,
juridically oriented form of captalism that has prevailed
since the mid 15th century is transmogrifying. Who knows what
things will look like in 50 or 100 years.
One favorite anecdote that I like to keep in mind is:
Gutenburg's press was repossessed. It almost makes me weep
with laughter.
I think these lyrics from David Byrnes' album, The Forest, say
it better than all of the words I might utter on the topic.
They just make me smile a quiet smile for the wisdom they
contain about change, and the human place in the world, and
about human hubris. After all, what is the glory of language
idolized but the amber in which petrified ego is ensnared?
Byrne:
Mai lajf is bjutifull
Mai Bet soft and Worm
Wejk ap mai lidle lembs
Sun yt uyl bi daun.
Oll sings, ar wondefull
Houm is neva far
Your Poppa hyrs ju nau.
Aj hijr hym krain.
Uan end Tu end Sfri and vor
Hoold on Tajt end dount let gou.
Stiks end stouns uil brejk
jour bouns.
God hes left as on aur oun.
Uan and Tu end Sfri end vor
Aj dont keer end dont nou.
Hold on tajt end dount let
gou.
i am studying the power of language. any help would be gratefully accepted.
#Hey totally understand what you are saying, as a student of linguistics. This however just a natural progression. We are a hightech society and time is our most valuable asset.
#Hey totally understand what you are saying, as a student of linguistics. This however just a natural progression. We are a hightech society and time is our most valuable asset.
#(read more)
March 3, 2003 10:08 AM