I had to laugh at a recent CNN.com article about the alleged 20th anniversary of the "text message."
Why? because it points out the trouble we English language speakers
make for ourselves by having made English the product of journalistic
shorthand babble and public ignorance. Obviously what the eager to be
hip, slightly older than young CNN journalist meant was an electronic
message sent by mobile phone and not a written or typed or inscribed on a
clay tablet message -- nor even a telegram or radiogram or Telex or
teletype or Telefax or any of the relatively (in youth culture terms)
ancient ways of delivering text to a distant recipient. I mean really,
we still have messages in text written in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Isn't there some sort of axiom that would show that messages in text
are text messages? Sure as hell should be, even if it's not what the
hipsters are saying this week.
The article includes
the traditional chuckle about LOL and OMG, but has already forgotten
the little shorthands of the ASCII message age back in the 1990's: and all the emoticons used to prevent hostile misunderstandings e-mail brought us. Forgotten by nearly all of us are the hundreds of devices of the telegraph age like QSL? or 73, meaning "did you understand" or "best regards" or even ARL46 -- Happy Birthday. Times change and most everything you think is brand new is older than that. An Egyptian scribe might add a symbol to the word "mut" so you'd know he was talking about a vulture and not your mother -- rather an important distinction.
Yes, technological confusion
and ignorance of the history of technology is overwhelming amongst our
born in the 1980's "tech savvy" population, many of whom couldn't
reproduce or accurately describe an early 19th century telegraph
system, but that medieval scribes were "texting" and the Marquis du
Sade was "Sexting" sould seem obvious to those not primed to think only
in the ephemeral and vague terms of teen jargon: people who think the
world is very new -- people otherwise known as Americans.
Point well taken. But I'm going to quibble just a bit.
ReplyDeleteEnglish has been an incredibly strong, increasingly pervasive language for a reason. Few other languages are as dynamically and rapidly evolving, especially where technology and social trends are concerned. Indeed, there have been indignant movements in France and Germany (I think) fighting evolution of their native tongues, especially where the inclusion of English words, American slang and commercial-speak are concerned. I recall that French was the universal language of diplomacy and, to a considerable extent, of international commerce when I was a kid. That has pretty much gone by the wayside. English now dominates. I think its dynamism and fluidity play a big part in that.
Re: "text message." The presumably eager to be hip, slightly older than young CNN journalist might well have been influenced not so much by teen culture as by corporate ad copy and contract legalese, both of which spell out charges and terms for "text messaging." That is a distinct form of cell phone service, as opposed to yakking, email, "instant messaging" via the Web, and so on.
10-4? ;)
I was taking a Quixotic shot at humor here, but of course, complaining about the addition of foreign words in English was an academic fashion for centuries, I know, and a doomed fashion. Yes, I'm happy for all the French, Latin, Norse and Saxon derived words I get to use, but I'm still not going to order a Venti from a Barista though, and in Italy, such shameful behavior is actually illegal. Fie on such pretentiousness and get thee to Dunkin' Donuts!
ReplyDeleteEnglish is a great language mostly because of its multiple sources and few tongues if any have a greater vocabulary. It's a great language because of the incomparable literature created in it and perhaps a language that is fading in power because that literature has become the property of a dwindling few who can read it. It sometimes seems like Indian and British writers and their readers know and use words that Americans can't understand. Can it be that non-American writers have an advantage in being able to express more complex, subtle and even more beautiful things than Americans with our 10,000 word vocabularies; Americans for whom what doesn't suck is awesome?
Yes, much of our Newspeak is Orwellian in origin. Commercial, political, the product of PR and marketing - designed to sell us something or to keep us from thinking about something analytically and many of us here have commented on the political abuses of language like "right to life" and the Patriot Act, but our American eagerness to sound like we dropped out of second grade and got our education in some back alley or jail yard is more troublesome and less understandable and hence my sardonic grin. Seriously, can you see advertizing for "Mobile Estates" without rolling your eyes?
But that's an old complaint and not one I was making here. It's more that I think some recognition of our eager, gleeful conformism and our love of saying the latest things in the latest way is due and ironic comments are in order when a message in text isn't necessarily a text message. In fact it's never only a message in text any more. Are we exhibiting linguistic dynamism or Conservative blindness?
Sure, I can send a digital message in text form over the radio -- I do it all the time, but being a realist, I know that most people aren't aware that people do this and don't know how it's done. I know that most people prefer not to say mobile phone text messages to differentiate them from all other digital modes if by some chance they're aware of them. I know what my grandchildren mean by Text message. I know we all speak as though we were charged by the word in America, but sorry, I gotta laugh because the older I get, the more people do seem to have been born yesterday.
Oh, I can well understand displeasure with some of the trendy terms and unfortunate usages that crop up in American English all the time. "The general public" is a longtime source of annoyance. What other kind of public is there, private public? Wait, that's an oxymoron.
ReplyDeleteA current irritant goes like this: "Dozens stood on line, waiting for the store to open." I'm sure the management sent an associate outside to paint a stripe down the sidewalk and all those people carefully arranged themselves so their feet were right on it. Not. Saying "stood in line" makes more sense to me, but what do I know? :)
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteImagine how yesterday people seem to ME to have been born, since my collective dino-memory stretches all the way back to the mid-Jurassic.
Anyway, I would respond to SW by suggesting that French may not have lost its lingua franca status so much because of its own properties as because the USA has become a dominant force in the world in material ways since WWII. The language is indeed supple, but I'm not sure its suppleness has made it king of the hill. French has a lot going for it -- it's both beautiful and fairly easy to learn, even though substantial differences between orthography and pronunciation create some headaches.
What I dislike most about current English usage is the Orwellian impoverishment it seems to be undergoing: you can't call a bloke "dapper" or "handsome" anymore, or a woman "lovely." No, both genders, you see, are either "hot" or not. In other words, you either want to bed them or you don't. That kind of language betrays the mentality of a hormone-fueled teenager, and it's most unseemly when such offal is uttered by mature adults. But it's all but universal. Need I say more? Well, how about "under the bus" and dozens of similar idiot-expressions millions mindlessly absorb from our pervasive talky-shows and repeat?
We must do battle not necessarily to preserve El Castellano or the Queen's English or the Oxford dictionary, but to treasure and nourish intelligent intercourse and to vanquish the prurient prattlings of the purveyors of profanity.
DeleteIt seems like the whole, "Is she hot?" thing started with Howard Stern who never really wanted to bed anyone at all. I often refer to women as pretty or, as you suggest, lovely if true. I call people attractive or men handsome. "And they're all so good-looking!" is one of my favorites.
I haven't seen "under the bus!" so much since the regrettable PUMA movement faded. To his credit, Romney never said it once. Imagine the horrors.... "This president threw American women under the bus!" "This president wants to throw job creators under the bus!"
Honestly, I think it's just a bad idea in general to watch almost any television at all these days.
"the prurient prattlings of the purveyors of profanity."
DeleteBy George he's got it!
This is an old war - the war between "descriptive" versus "prescriptive" grammarians - and there is just cause on both sides. The descriptive grammarian views language as a living organism subject to change with respect to time. Consider Otto Jespersen who studied the Great Vowel Shifts of English and argued that linguistic history and cultural history (including social mobility) move in tandem. The prescriptive grammarian would be the "conservative" among us - wanting to preserve Langue Maternelle from vulgar assaults that would sully Her prim and proper reputation. Personally, I appreciate such abbreviations as WTF and STFU, which have liberated me from stuffy academic discourse. I would rather be "over the top" than thrown "under a bus."
ReplyDeleteOcto,
ReplyDeleteAs long as your hair isn't on fire and you don't push the envelope outside the box. It's important to work 'impact' into every sentence too. Hell-O-oh, it's not Rocket science dude.
Otto had a point. Our language may be tracking the rise of the peasantry to power (is Marx smiling?) through the electronic media and it does track the "coolness" of speaking the vulgate rather than the language of the effite elite: the coolness of rejecting civilization and all it's rules. A linguistic Tea Party or Anti-cultural Revolution perhaps.
Dino,
I'm glad someone else thinks of Orwell here. I mean he's so ossum! and impactful, of course. Four legs good, two legs suck -- or at least they're sorta sucky.
SW
As long as they aren't "towing" the line, I'm happy, but perhaps the point is 'Mute' as they keep saying in the local paper.
But really, I wasn't posting about that old prescriptive/descriptive dichotomy. I think it's an argument that only matters in the abstract, since in trying to communicate one has to give some weight to dictionaries else we'd have to learn the local dialect anew every day if we want to sound fourteen or cool which is the same thing.
It's a question of speed and balance. It's the speed of change that annoys me and the willingness quickly to abandon words to the least knowledgeable and able users of the language -- maybe we ought to wait just a few hours before assuming 'intact' is now properly 'in tact' as it seems to be around here. Maybe I can quote a Sutra and say that what is a living thing is also a dying thing?
No, portmanteau words like Sexting based on a verbed noun aren't killing English, but the journalists dying to sound hip by removing them from their ironic/sarcastic substrate -- are. As a witticism, it works, as Standard English? "Not so much" a sthe journalism majors say, now that it's been sucked dry of humor -- those same pathetic sods who are still calling Casey Anthony Totmom after all these years for reasons only apparent to whatever trolls serve as editors.
But really, would it kill people to say "send it in text" instead of "text it?" Words are still free unless you're sending them by Western Union and you're not. Enough damned jargon dudes and dudettes - you know your AA in journalism doesn't make you Walter Kronkite and you're just sucking up to the street brats and mall rats trying to be relevant.
People who get all dismissive when I try to differentiate between noisy and noisome seem nonetheless to get pretty authoritarian about arbitrary conventions of spelling and apostrophe placement too. Is that hypocrisy -- or may I substitute hypoxia since it sounds so similar?
I'm amused by the peremptory attitude of some who give us the "descriptive" line and yet demand that we not say this and always say that: insist that gender and sex are unrelated terms for instance or that Orient is bad and Asia good -- people who aren't even slightly amused by sentences like "the impact of the collision was great" and then sell me the "descriptive" prescription?
But I was writing about forgetfulness above. The profound unawareness of the world before last Wednesday that drives the changes in American English. That ancient era of the 80's when the "cave men" carried very large cell phones and everything was in black and white.
So what If I'm a linguistic schmuck,
ReplyDeleteWith neologisms mun aruck,
To you, it’s a blumb dunder;
To me, it’s no wuck’n fonder,
‘Cause it’s hard to avoid fords like wuck.
Oh, it's easy to avoid Fords. Just step on the gas. Irregardless, I saw "in tact" used in an advertisement yesterday. I'm sure it's in Websters by now along with irregardless. But "like talk" is rapidly like fading. Like you don't hear it like you used to, like every other effing word. I'm like happy.
ReplyDelete