I would soooooo love to be that guy! I know, I know, I have ranted and bitched about the decline of language before. But seriously! Do you listen to people talk? I have been wondering about how hard it must be for people to learn English as a second language when nothing spoken on the street or in music is at all what it is in the classroom. Ya feel me, dawg?
Maybe it's a sign of age? I don't know. What I do know is that it bothers me, no that's not right, it scares the crap out of me. Who will be the new Shakespeares, the new Mark Twains? Hell, who is going to be the new Shel Silversteins of the world? Will there be another Charles Dickens?
I don't know what the future holds for the English language but it seems that standards have been dropped or just dispensed with altogether. Is it a good thing? Not good as in good vs evil, but more like good-useful, good-productive, that sort of good. Language is like a river ever-flowing, ever-changing, but sometimes it moves at a pace that is hard to appreciate when you are in the midst.
Any thoughts about this? Is it occurring in all languages at the same pace? I know when I try to do online chats with friends in Latin America the shortened-up IM Spanish is like a whole new language for me.
Lemme know whatcha think, a-iiiiggghhht?
1. learning English is hard, regardless of the IMization of it. I used the phrase "dragging their feet" the other day with a Mexico colleague, and he found that analogy quite interesting/new.
ReplyDelete2. my bff is fluent in Spanish. I sent her an IM string to translate for me, and she had a very hard time due to all the abbreviations...
Hey Lisa - I so agree with you. Both of my parents were linguists and wordsmiths, and it was really fun to peruse the dictionary with them to learn new things. I know it sounds really hokey in this day and age, but it was fun. And . . . I used to love to diagram sentences. Seriously. Especially the really tricky ones!
ReplyDeleteAnd another things that drives me CRAZY: ahtAlete, nucUlear, realAtor, etc. Good gArief!