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.

Why 1984 Didn't Happen.

The assignment was simple--discuss George Orwell's penetrating novel "1984."

It was an assignment I told my 16-year-old daughter that reminded me that I had the same task when 1984 was a long distance in the future, and seemed likely to happen. But the year came and went, and Orwell's vision was not the one we have lived in since the target year.
Why didn't Orwell's world of three superpowers in ever-changing alliances, of carefully controlled language and the ability to rewrite the past at will come about, no matter how inevitable those developments may have once seemed?

Two unforeseen trends derailed that movement--The development of individual control over data and religious and national ferment.

Orwell's world relied on controlled data and the mainframe centered world that existed before 1984 was ideal for creating the belief we were headed towards a truly effective Big Brother. But as the pictures from the repression in Mynamar shows, controlling information has gotten tougher. The move toward democratization of data started with the PC and then continued with the development of the Internet and steamrolled along with hand-held voice and data devices.

The other development was the power of two older movements--religion and nationalism--to challenge the regime in the Soviet Union that was founded on economic theory--Communism.
The power of religion resonates with radical Islam in the Middle East and, in some sense, it simmers with those in the United States who would be happier with religion as part of day-to-day government. It is embodied in the fact that Israel exists and is opposed. It gave the worker's movement in Poland a base to challenge the Soviet system. It threatens to shake the generals in Myanmar.

The spread of nationalism has been part of the last 200 years, although it was seriously sidetracked by the Russian Revolution and the spread of Communism. But the fact that countries that have often not been independent, such as Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania once again exist and Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia split apart, and the arrival of so many new nations across the globe, is a tribute to the power of nationalism.

Big Brother may be watching. But he's not always in control.