Do You Speak Textish?

Journalists have always stood for correct spelling, grammar and stylistic consistent.

But two weeks ago, my former boss asked, “Is that still important?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

In a world in which textish is increasingly the language of the young and technologically entitled does good spelling and grammar and consistent style matter?

Unless you are simply obsessive, the only reason for standardized spelling, grammar and style is to ensure communication. Obviously, a lot of “errors” in the traditional classroom sense can occur in any medium using visual letter images—and I’ll include electronic communication here because it using letter images, even if they aren’t printed on paper.

The rational for enforcing rules is that, left to itself, language tends to wander off into new dialects, although spoken mass communications has made this tougher, although not impossible. We all think we sound like the TV announcers.

Standards are also the enemies of a vital language and they mask the changes in the spoken word, which always move faster than the mutations in their print counterparts.

Thus, classical Latin persisted in the written form long after the people in the provinces started dropping the word endings added preposition to a highly declined language, on their way to become the Romance family.

The same is true of English, whose spelling reflects pronunciations as long-dead as Chaucer—take those “silent E’s” at the end of words. Or take the “gh family” in which words like daughter, tough and thought testify to the disappearance of an aspirated guttural sound (like the Scottish ‘Loch”).

Spoken language could change rapidly because it is used so much more outside of the classroom where there are few monitors to say, “That’s not the way we say it.”

Lacking language Academy to fight change, the way the French do, English speakers have seen the written language slowed by schools and in my ways by written journalism. And journalists hang on to usage long after the rest of the world has changed. After all, many of us are the last bastions of the use of traditional state abbreviations like Calif., N.Y., and IN while the schools capitulated to the postal CA, NY and IN a long time ago.

However, the various forms of speedy electronic communication such as email, instant message and texting (as opposed to static Web page postings), bypass the traditional monitors.

With teenagers spewing out text at a frightening rate (frightening to bill payers), it seems possible they will change the written language at a rate that was previously impossible.
Or will texting simply become another layer of usage, like the existing one of vulgar, slag, colloquial and formal, that happily co-exist in various parts of our lives.

M I sure? I don’t no.