The Etownian >> Opinion
Language, or death thereof
Thursday September 24 2009
I try hard to write ‘you’ in three letters, spell out ‘be back soon’ and use ‘haha’ only when I’m actually laughing. If I have nothing else to say, why ‘lol’? Our written conversations have become like our fast food: expedient, artless, ephemeral.If you liken American cuisine to modern communication, what role does the hamburger play? Senior occupational therapy major Sara Brown has an idea. “What is American food?” asked Brown. “It’s mostly a melting pot of multiple cultures. But the hamburger — that is a unique, convenient and delicious all-American addition to the culinary world. Acronyms are like the hamburger of modern communication. It is spoiling our appetite for proper grammar and speech.”
Visit www.aim.com/acronyms and you will find over 140 acronyms that will “help you type faster and decipher what people are saying.” Regarding text messaging, for example, I wish I’d ‘BTDTGTTSAWIO’; meaning, I wish I’d ‘been there, done that, got the t-shirt and wore it out.”
In our culture we have adopted an extreme minimalism at which even Hemingway would cringe. And it’s scary. People look at your words funny if there are too many or if they come across as fancy-schmancy. Technology has encouraged us to acronym-ize the English language to the extent where some people question your intelligence or social decorum if your IMs remind them of short essays. Start a text or IM with a paragraph, and you’ll see it is too much work for your reader. Receive a short letter on your instant messaging system of choice and, even if it’s Mom checking in, we instinctively think they’re too desperate or we’re too lazy.
Senior accounting major Michael Ruzzo weighed in on the motivations behind it all. “I think most people believe they use acronyms to save time, and this might be partially true. But the heart of matter lies in the fact that acronyms require less thinking. Culturally speaking, I do not think they are beneficial. I believe human interaction is at its best when it is directly with a person. The use of acronyms could have the potential to limit our use of English, but I believe most people can separate the use of AIM speak from formal writing and speaking,” said Ruzzo.
“AIM speak” is the new American vernacular and it has become a form of social language control. We’re not witnessing a phase or funk — ten years is too long. It is unavoidably a pervading medium of casual communication peaking the slippery slope of quasi-illiteracy.
If you’ve read George Orwell’s “1984,” qualifying this trend as scary makes more sense. One of the main themes of his celebrated book is the importance of language and how it molds and essentially limits our capacity to communicate and construct ideas. The main character, Winston Smith, and his encounter with Syme, an employee who works on destroying words, is most evincing. Syme believes that Newspeak, the representation of every thought or desire in a single word, will replace Oldspeak (modern English) by 2050. Ironically, we never read of Syme again and must assume along with Smith that this man who dedicated his life to vaporizing words vaporized himself by way of his skill in it.
I hope I’m wrong and this is just a phase soon to be extinct. It is not my intention to prophesy negativity onto language in the coming years or to label us as incapable of proper communication. As Ruzzo points out, we prove such claims wrong in our formal writing and speech. Our generation seems to maintain a healthy balance between casual “Newspeak” (AIM speak) and formal ”Oldspeak.” But those following our footsteps may not adhere to or value this balance.
I do think there’s a little bit of Syme in all of us. Flowery language takes time to write and to read, and, in certain contexts, it is simply purposeless. But let’s not be so shy of it that we strive radically into a minimalism that doesn’t even spell out words. Ultimately, let’s try to keep our Symes on shorter leashes so the left hemispheres in our brains never have to wear one.
The Etownian >> Opinion