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I bet my mom is gonna jump on this one.
Here’s the back story: My Uncle Larry just joined Facebook. Oh yes. It’s a family affair now. He sent me a message that said, and I quote:
You can tell them if Uncle Larry can do it…..
bumper sticker brevity and YB poignancy - c even i’m doing it!
It was the ‘c’ that caught my eye. He meant ’see,’ but more importantly, did my mom’s cool older brother
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Comments
09.15.08
Same might be said for the food we eat. Isn't the point simply to sustain oneself? Why do we bother paying so much care to what we eat, how we eat, and how well we eat?
Last weekend I found an anonymous open letter stuck under my door. It was a resident in the gated community where I live complaining about the management office's lacluster maintenance of public spaces and curt attitude. Rather than getting fired up at the issues (which were mostly valid, by the way) raised by the anonymous writer, I found myself grumbling about the letter's horrendous misspellings and poor grammar. Was I not worth the author's time to write properly (barring rare and understandable typos, of course) and proofread? I wondered.
Is the point of communication simply to understand each other? I'd hope not, but much more. I want my sonnets. I want my Gettysburg address. Don't mention Shakespeare -- I hated his spelling of words!!
09.15.08
I don't think the language mutilation is the problem so much as the reason behind it. We're butchering the English language (which is screwed up enough without our help, thanks so much) in our haste to send out tweets, text messages, and IM's that mean next to nothing. For some reason, however, it is absolutely important that we communicate some inane idea as often as humanly possible to whoever will listen and, as such, dumb down the English language because of it.
It's not an evolution so much as it's the path of least resistance. Now, the people who graduate high school and college without knowing how to spell can communicate without feeling bad about their ignorance. Instead of mourning the breadth of their inability, they have an excuse to pretend they're spelling like idiots because someone said the language is evolving and now they're not inept, they're evolved.
09.16.08
I think a lot about this topic. And maybe I'm nuts, but I think that gen Xers are most likely to use that type of language when they have a full keyboard -- c u soon, for example. And a younger person is more likely to type things out fully when they can. A young person, who grew up texting on their phone, thinks that c u soon is for when typing is very hard, and otherwise, type it out.
Ryan Healy pointed this out to me once in another way. I often type on a regular keyboard without using capital letters, and he told me it's a Gen-Xer thing to do.
I'm not sure about any of this, though. I wonder if other people agree or disagree.
Penelope
09.16.08
@Penelope
It seems counter intuitive, but perhaps also accurate. Here's why I think it's the case: Gen Y grew up with modern keyboards. We learned to type on computers, not typewriters. Of course typing on a computer allows for more room for error than a typewriter. I can afford to type things out fully, because correcting a mistake is easy. But if I grew up typing on a typewriter, I might lean toward brevity--the less you type, the less you might screw up. Sure, by the late 80s/early 90s typewriters developed some methods of correction, but it certainly isn't the same.
It's a theory, anyway.
09.16.08
I have one Gen X friend who consistently types without capital letters. And I almost never use phonetic abbreviations even when texting. Most of my friends don't, either--we'll drop words and text in incomplete sentences, but phonetic abbreviations are not all that common.
So what is common? I don't know--this is a very small sample I'm talking about. But it does seem to me that abbreviations and text language represent not the evolution of language, but the contraction of it. We're losing words letter by letter, and I'm not sure what we're gaining in exchange.
09.16.08
I think the language is actually changing. How many of us speak in 19th Century English?
As far as Anna's theory about the typewriters, I was going to refute it and then I realized I DID learn to type on a typewriter. :)
09.16.08
Perhaps what I should have said was "not the evolution of language, but the devolution of it." (the second meaning of devolution, not the first one, per Merriam-Webster) I don't yet see how these changes improve the language, but I do see how they signal linguistic losses.
I, on the other hand, learned to type on a computer. (We had both, and I used both, but it was computer word processing that was my primary method.) So there's some variation, as I'd expect.
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