Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Technology= Decline of English
It seems that technology is slowly putting a deathgrip on society. We are losing our basic abilities to communicate. I know I am guilty of putting "u" instead of actually writing out the word. IM technology and text messaging has caused a degradation of the English language leaving us with a bastardized version of it. I was spurned to comment on this fact when I was proof-reading one of my own papers and discovering many mistakes where I had used IM jargon instead of traditional english. Lord help us all and the english language!
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3 comments:
I agree that we are losing our abilities to communicate. Everytime I recieve an email or a text from someone I know their is always IM Jargon being used. I agree with Justin on proofreading papers and finding your IM Jargon being used rather than writing out the word. I think that this has caused some problems in society, because most younger kids like my nieces and nephews can tell you all the IM jargon from texting back and forth with friends but they seem to not be able to spell your most common and basic types of words. I think that as a society we might want to stop and think about how much we use this type of languae rather than properly writing words out, and writing in a more gramitical way. If I was to guess on what society would say is, "WHO CARES" (lol).
I also agree that technology is putting a damper on communication. Initially, words were simply shortened in order to save space in a text or to send a message quicker, but now, it seems like people are going out of their way to develop new chat-speak phrases that they then use in everyday written and even oral communication. Not only are words being abbreviated, but also, people indulge in using alternate spellings such as “hawt” for “hot” or “den” for “then”. Furthermore, thanks to the infiltration of cell-speak, punctuation has been virtually eliminated from the written communication of the younger generations. Perhaps this helps to explain why students at the college level continue to struggle with basic grammatical errors in punctuation on academic papers and tests; indeed, this proves to be one of the most common weaknesses in the essays that I edit at Thomas More’s Writing Center. Moreover, written cell-speak is transitioning into our verbal communication. I will be the first to admit that the deplorable phrase “omg” has unconsciously escaped my lips on numerous occasions. I only hope that I will be able to regulate that vocabulary in my future professional career.
However, besides the obvious downfall of cell-speak, I also think that this kind of broken language is hindering the idea of the international community. Especially in situations where English is not an individual’s native language, the cryptic nature of cell-speak adds more barriers to communication. On the online forum that I moderate, we actually give user infractions to members who use cell-speak in their posts because of the fact that we have so many regular visitors who learned English as a second or third language. To give you an idea of the obstacle presented here, try to understand this post by a user that wrote in a combination of English cell-speak, German, and the Tagalog language of the Philippines:
“we go to da hauz of pwend of my sister nd i saw dey wir sliping bcos of da noisies dey wir awake then i ran cos i think dat kuya bill is angry to my bcos of my carelessness so when dey r all dress up dey went outside nd i shaut kuya bill nd i go to him den kuya bill egnor (oder pipol dinot egnor kuya bill ivendo he never meet them) me den i walk away when walking nd kuya bill go to me yl waking den he said why do you walk away then i replied cos think dat u r angry tome bcos of my blog den kuya bill start to laught”
I venture to say that persons from any one of those three nationalities would cease to be able to fully understand what this account is about after the first read-through.
“we go to da hauz of pwend of my sister nd i saw dey wir sliping bcos of da noisies dey wir awake then i ran cos i think dat kuya bill is angry to my bcos of my carelessness so when dey r all dress up dey went outside nd i shaut kuya bill nd i go to him den kuya bill egnor (oder pipol dinot egnor kuya bill ivendo he never meet them) me den i walk away when walking nd kuya bill go to me yl waking den he said why do you walk away then i replied cos think dat u r angry tome bcos of my blog den kuya bill start to laught”
wh47 15 h3 54y1ng! 13375p34k 15 34513r 70 und3r574nd 7h4n 7h4t! j00 kn0w wh47 1'm 54y1ng?
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