Thursday, September 14, 2006

Wordacus Maximus

Language: Twitching muscles and an expulsion of air from the lungs disrupt the space surrounding a body. A limited scale Doppler carries the disruptions through tympanic membranes, cochlea and other science words that really don’t mean much to anybody other than scientists and Gill Grissom. Then, if the brain has been trained properly, those wavelengths and sonic disruptions are conceptualized into mental images both abstract and tangible. From its humble origins as “grunt, counter-grunt, club in the head” to the most the erudite lectures of academia, humans have dug themselves in a nice rut of using sound to convey various messages to each other. At some point we, as a species, decided to start writing down our ideas. Cuneiform to glyphs to characters, this fad called writing seems to be one that is not going to die any time soon. Over the last sixty years the diffusion of spoken and written language, fueled by unprecedented technological advancement, has allowed for near limitless communication. Anybody with an internet connection can read my blog and then instantly respond. Voice over internet protocol technology is rendering telephones archaic and allowing for free as ISP fees communication around the world. While I am still a proponent of face to face conversations and negotiations whenever possible, I am content with the current electronic exchange of thought and idea. However, there is one sine qua non for successful electronic interchange, the ability to write clearly and effectively. (Insert grammatical/ironic pokes at Copyright Adam Durrant here!) But, it seems that when you open something up to the masses, the masses have a way of bringing it down to their level. Shorthand for cell phones, gamer talk, abbreviations that are not real abbreviations and this bastard here, “ :) “ devastate written English. For example, telling a person they are “l33t” carries with it such a subtext that an entire volume could be written on the subject, “The cultural significance of being l33t”. So rather than contextualize the abstract notion, the transcendental awe and respect such that you will deem another mortal soul l33t humbling yourself and all progeny yet to come, an act which would require considerable perspicacity, we shuffle along rather than forcing ourselves to truly grasp the notion by calculating it in our heads and translating into our language of choice. Of course, some would argue that this is the growth of the language. English expanding to reflect the technophile nature of Western civilization and “greifers” like myself are just literary Luddites. But growth of language isn’t my issue. My gripe is net jargon being used as an excuse for bad writing, or worse still the only form of writing that people are capable of producing. Not withstanding the fact that our broken high school system does not train people in how to effectively write, that is a different post for a different day, do we really want to live in a world of where English is subject to slang jargon phonetics? ‘Net talk is nothing more than a new way to justify the ugly fact that most of us can’t write to save our lives. But since everybody is doing it, we are all too willing to chalk it up to the times and wave the white paper of appeaement. "Oh Durrant," you say. "You just couldn't think of anything better to talk about this week so you picked something at random." Fine, don’t listen to me. Just keep on LOLing, ROFLing and LMAOing your way through communications and wonder why when it comes to matters of importance, the written word fails to communicate the complexity or even subtlety that you had imagined it would. Enjoy the forty pieces of sliver made manfiest through a few less keystrokes. If what we write is how we are remembered by history, do we really want to be the generation that led to the utter stupefaction of the English language? The clockwork apathy of people will allow for the translation of written trends into spoken language. And then one day, rather than laughing at a joke somebody will adapt the ‘LOL’ abbreviation into an actual word. On that day, I will have one more reason to shake my head at the world. For now, I hope those of you who assimilate without understanding and further demolish the language that I work in won’t be too upset from being Pwn’d so utterly and throughly. Oh irony thy name is Durrant.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

hmm,

I would like to point out the fact that saying "LOL" out loud is already filtering into everyday use in some contexts... so yeah, that day has come and gone for some years already.

As much as it did hurt me to hear it (possibly as much as someone else I know saying "sigh" instead of just doing so), is it really so bad for people to be bastardizing languages the way they do? Sure, it stresses the functional aspect of English more than anything, but it doesn't make it any less capable than it was before. It just ties it tightly with real-time communication in a way it didn't before, with short-term feedback effects when voice chats are happening simultaneously;

Have you ever seen the jargon file?