Most Atrocious Betrayal of Language I've Ever Seen

[Jimbob]

If anyone texts me with all this "shortened slang", i never return a text. If people chat on MSN or FB Chat in the same manner, or with really shortened words and/or slang then i don't talk back to them at all.

 

I appreciate to be spoken to in true English, none of this slang-chat. I know people who only speak like this, and i don't like it. Chavvy is how i call it.

[EEVILMURRAY]

That hand is too busy flipping the bird constantly at the screen.

Lies. It's holding your cider bottle and you know it. Or perhaps a ciggie, did you ever reach a decision about your late night loft window opening mission?

[Dan_Dare]

We should draw a line between genuinely slang (an enriching thing for any language, full of possibilities) and lazy bullshit. Text speak falls in to the latter, especially on facebook - it makes perfect sense when you only have your thumbs to work with on a tiny, rudimentary phone pad, but on a QWERTY keyboard it has no reason for being. It is, in fact, harder to do than actually typing so it means that the typist is, in fact, an oxygen thief.

[lostmario]

grate (great) and anti (auntie) are two I've come across on Facebook recently.

 

The excuse, its quicker to type it that way... G R A T E, G R E A T... hmmm

[Serebii]

I am so sick of the there/their/they're and your/you're mixes

[ReZourceman]

I am so sick of the there/their/they're and your/you're mixes

 

Your right, I'm genuinely starting to believe that theirs no one out they're that actually knows what there talking about. o___0

Edited December 1, 2010 by Dan_Dare

[Beast]

I don't mind them mixing those up, it's just typing lyk dis den tryn 2 mk us dcifr evrithn. It gets seriously annoying.

[Dan_Dare]

I feel very strongly about the correct use of language- not because I'm some grammar nazi but because it's so brilliant. English (and others) is such a brilliantly diverse and complex language with such depth and scope of meaning that it allows for the most brilliant forms of expression. To misuse it is more than a simple convenience, it's a loss of clarity and meaning that can only really be achieved by a robust and complex vocabulary. You can say so much more when you say it right.

[Serebii]

 

Your right, I'm genuinely starting to believe that theirs no one out they're that actually knows what there talking about. o___0

Oh, how I long for a gun...

 

Oh, and the whole "effect"/"affect" thing. That bugs the hell out of me. When I see someone do that, I just want to whack them with a cause.

[Jonnas]

 

Your right, I'm genuinely starting to believe that theirs no one out they're that actually knows what there talking about. o___0

 

Y wus dis poest edditd bye Dan Dear x ????

It's horrible to type like that!

But seriously, was this the work of ReZ or Dan?

 

 

 

One of the things that gets me is certain people not knowing the difference between "accept" and "except". I mean, seriously, what's the excuse?

[Dan_Dare]

I 'edited' it to get a HTML quote for my sig but decided it didn't look right in full and wasn't funny enough without the whole context.

[The Peeps]

Oh, how I long for a gun...

 

Oh, and the whole "effect"/"affect" thing. That bugs the hell out of me. When I see someone do that, I just want to whack them with a cause.

 

I feel the same. Also with accept/except and then/than.

 

Another thing that gets to me is when people type of instead have as in 'I must of forgotten my keys'. It should be must have!

[Supergrunch]

I feel very strongly about the correct use of language- not because I'm some grammar nazi but because it's so brilliant. English (and others) is such a brilliantly diverse and complex language with such depth and scope of meaning that it allows for the most brilliant forms of expression. To misuse it is more than a simple convenience, it's a loss of clarity and meaning that can only really be achieved by a robust and complex vocabulary. You can say so much more when you say it right.

Sorry to pick on you Dan, but this post embodies one of the most common misconceptions that many intelligent people have about language; that having a bigger vocabulary and a better grasp of prescriptive grammatical rules gives you a greater depth and range of expression. This is by no means the case.

 

First, it’s worth making a clear distinction between spoken and written language, because as I indicated earlier, many of the supposed “grammatical†errors are actually just misspellings. Though it can be hard to realise in a society where writing is so prominent, speech is absolutely the primary form of language, with written language being very much an ugly young upstart by comparison. This has been recognised by linguists since the early 20th Century – children learn to speak so long as they can hear other speakers, yet they must be taught to read and write, and here spoken language is a prerequisite. Spoken language has (probably) existed for between 2 million and 50,000 years, whereas it appears that writing emerged less than 7000 years ago. Limiting our discussion to English for the sake of simplicity, we can say that the property those who are fluent in English share is that they all speak some variety of English, yet whether they can write is neither here nor there.

 

This is compounded by the fact that written English doesn’t bear all that much relation to spoken English. For instance, the words tap and tape are both monosyllabic and differ only in the vowel used, yet this difference is reflected by an additional e at the end of the word in the written form, which is entirely counterintuitive. It’s true that such difficulties result from English going through the Great Vowel Shift, and the standard written forms better reflect (early) Middle English pronunciation than they do the pronunciation of modern English, but no languages use writing systems that perfectly reflect pronunciation, and many are far worse off than English. So it’s understandable that people may get confused and spell things incorrectly, and one example of this is the use of could of instead of could have; in fast colloquial speech, these two are pronounced identically, hence the error. Now of course our writing system isn’t a free for all, and generally we use a strictly standardised one, which is useful in many contexts – indeed, before such a form was agreed upon for English, people used to believe that one of the key differences between modern languages and ancient ones such as Latin was this difference of standardisation. Today we can see that this represents a failure to identify spoken language as primary, but also shows how agreeing on spelling can be important. So errors such as could of should probably be avoided if you want to be able to spell, but it’s interesting that interpretation of the writing system could ultimately lead to the reinterpretation of the auxiliary ’ve as a preposition in the language itself, which could have all sorts of consequences for the structure of the language. This kind of change is unavoidable though; it’s not like correcting spelling can stop it as by that point it’s too late, but it’s also no bad thing – such changes are far too slow to affect comprehension between generations, and they don’t introduce ambiguity.

 

Text speak and the like is more interesting then, because here we’re not looking at spelling errors, but rather conscious choices to spell differently. Obviously this kind of thing is no good for formal purposes, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely useless. For instance, abbreviations aren’t just “lazy,†they can end up serving more useful purposes than the original form, such as @ in twitter/blog/irc comments, and even i.e. in formal writing, which doesn’t mean exactly the same thing as the Latin id est, but has a meaning more suited to academic writing. And on top of this, such abbreviations take up less space and are less time consuming, both of which can be useful in the contexts they’re used (such as when you have to send a text message in a rush, making use of a limited number of characters). Furthermore, variant forms of writing like this can be used to increase expression, as attested by David Crystal in his book txting: the g8 db8, which considers precisely these issues, along with several other myths. Here’s an example he gives of a text message poem:

 

14: a txt msg pom.

his is r bunsen burner bl%

his hair lyk fe filings

W/ac/dc going thru.

I sit by him in kemistry

it splits my @toms

wen he :-)s @ me.

 

While this kind of thing is too much in its infancy to be directly compared to great poetry, it’s clear that using non-standard forms of writing can have interesting stylistic effects, and indeed increase the range of meaning available. And it’s not as if this a new thing – how about, for instance, symbolic writing, such as the heart in I [heart] NY, or even something like lolcat? While the silly examples in this thread are annoying and unimaginative, this isn’t because they’re in non-standard spelling, it’s because the writers made an attempt to be stylistically clever which utterly failed. Furthermore, you might associate this kind of writing with certain sociolinguistic groups you dislike for whatever reasons, giving you even more of a negative impression. Contrary to popular belief, use text speak on Facebook and so on doesn’t reflect an inability to spell. But in many of the examples in this thread, the writers are irritating for entirely different reasons.

 

I should probably discuss prescriptive grammatical rules also, which aren’t the same thing as prescriptive rules of spelling, which are actually useful in many contexts. Native speakers already know grammatical rules – this is a major part of what it means to know a language – so any supposed “rules†that have to be taught are either to do with spelling or style, or they’re pointless and not followed, like the ones to do with split infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions. And style is much more complex than just a few simple rules, so making up rules isn’t the way to address this sort of problem. Geoffrey Pullum covers this topic in huge amounts of detail, for example in this article – I think this post is already long enough as it is without going into more depth on this topic.

 

So that brings me to your claim about vocabulary, which is again problematic. While it can be useful to know more words to refer to things precisely, it’s not the case that you cannot comprehend a concept without knowing the word for it, and furthermore, you can even express such concepts using phrases of words you do know. Which of these is better depends on the individual case – for instance, using a word nobody else will know isn’t going to be of any help, and some long words can be far uglier or less efficient than simple phrases. So it’s by no means better to always use single words for concepts when possible, and so a greater vocabulary isn’t always helpful. And even in cases where distinctions of meaning have been lost, as with disinterested and uninterested which now basically mean the same thing, it’s not always the case that ambiguities result – here for instance, the context almost always makes the meaning clear. And if you think that context is a poor substitute for clarity of meaning, then realise that you use contexts to make meaning clear all the time – for instance, in sentences like I fell out of a tree and hit my head, it’s only context (speaking more technically, pragmatics) that causes you to order one event before the other. I’ll end with one of my favourite poems by e e cummings, which uses simple words and off the wall syntax, yet nonetheless conveys great depths of meaning.

 

why must itself up every of a park

anus stick some quote statue unquote to

prove that a hero equals any jerk

who was afraid to dare to answer "no"?

quote citizens unquote might otherwise

forget(to err is human;to forgive

divine)that if the quote state unquote says

"kill" killing is an act of christian love.

"Nothing" in 1944 AD

"can stand against the argument of mil

itary necessity"(generalissimo e)

and echo answers "there is no appeal

from reason"(freud)--you pays your money and

you doesn't take your choice.Ain't freedom grand

 

I used to have the same view as you, but gradually realised that it was just untenable, and though I clung to it for a while, I had to give it up. What’s annoying isn’t the type of language people use, but the way they use it.

[Dan_Dare]

God damn it, Grunch. Never change.

[The Bard]

1. How does your brain contain all this?

 

2. I am interpreting what you said (in part) as this:

 

Very much reminds me of Bakhtin and the heteroglossia of languages, wherein any given word or phrase is altered in time through usage by the social groups, professions, political factions etc. that use it. Of course, Bakhtin was referring to how words even in their standard notations (he was speaking of how social identities are manipulated in novels, so his theory pertains very much to writing as well as speech) are inflected with social variations, for example, the words "far out" have connotations that are specific to the context as well as the "socio-ideology" of the person that uses them, but I totally understand that text speak has the potential to work in this way since those forms of notation are characteristic of particualar social denominations.

 

The problem is, as with pretty much everything; It's a hate/ lazyness thing. I think we pretty much hate it by way of the kind of people we percieve it as being associated with, and also because whenever you see it on screen, it looks so counter intuitive, and you have to consciously decipher it, rather than the way in which our brain processes the notations that we're already familiar with. There was a great and really accessible piece Jonah Lehrer wrote recently about the process of mental "chunking," which, applied to language, in his own words, is:

"While reading this sentence, your brain is effortlessly chunking the letters, grouping the symbols into lumps of meaning. As a result, you don’t have to sound out each syllable, or analyze the phonetics; your literate brain is able to skip that stage of perception. This is what expertise is: the ability to rely on learned patterns to compensate for the inherent limitations of information processing in the brain."

 

This intuitive process, for people that don't use text speak, is basically epicly sharted on when reading text speak, and leads to no small amount of annoyance. It's similiar to the way in which the brain gets annoyed at music which contains rhythmic patterns that it cannot predict.

 

What is funny is that (and I'm generalising here) a lot of people who dislike text speak are the same people that tend to speak for individuality and expressionism.

 

Either way, I still hate txt spk. Because I'm a curmudgeonly fuck.

Edited December 1, 2010 by The Bard

[chairdriver]

I just hate people who are socially philistine. My friend Zander, who is an all-rounder stunner, writes in text speak a lot of the time, and it only adds, because he stuns. If a shit socially philistine person writes in text speak, I'm like "Get the fuck out".

 

It all leads back to hierarchy, and scales, and prejudgement.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

You're probably (read: most definitely) right, but I still can't help but hate text speak. Maybe it's the kind of people who use it that I actually dislike, I dunno.

[chairdriver]

Maybe it's the kind of people who use it that I actually dislike, I dunno.

 

Most definitely.

 

It's a relatively natural reaction to not like it when when people we don't like are given fora for self-expression, and self-definition.

[heroicjanitor]

It's a relatively natural reaction to not like it when when people we don't like are given fora for self-expression, and self-definition.

 

The first time I have ever seen someone use that word.

 

I don't like text speak because it makes people forget how to spell and I have to spend ages deciphering it. B82rz is batteries.

[Diageo]

I just hate people who are socially philistine. My friend Zander, who is an all-rounder stunner, writes in text speak a lot of the time, and it only adds, because he stuns. If a shit socially philistine person writes in text speak, I'm like "Get the fuck out".

 

It all leads back to hierarchy, and scales, and prejudgement.

I'm stunned at how stunning your constant use of the word stun is across all stunning fora.

[chairdriver]

The first time I have ever seen someone use that word.

 

Latin plural of forum. It felt more appropriate than forums for some reason.

 

I'm stunned at how stunning your constant use of the word stun is across all stunning fora.

 

Well I feel I've appropriated the word, to my own devices, to such an extent the stem verb is often "to stunn".

 

I love when people understand my notion of stunning. When I showed Kat the video for Willow's Whip My Hair, she really genuinely said "I'm stunned". Yeeeesss.

[Paj!]

Fuck off, Diageo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*grudged wink smiley*

[Diageo]

Fuck off, Diageo.

He's not angry, no reason for you to be.

[Paj!]

I'm not angry.

[Diageo]

I'm sorry, I assumed "Fuck off" meant you were angry.