Some people are horrified by the language shortcuts of the digital age.
“In the world of text messages, ignorance of grammar and punctuation obviously doesn’t affect a person’s ability to communicate messages such as ‘C U later,’ ” Lynne Truss writes.
Bill Walsh, in a chapter titled “Holding the (Virtual) Fort: Disturbing Trends in the Information Age,” writes, “When the shortened form of ‘electronic mail’ began appearing in print, the question was whether it should be e-mail or E-mail; the lowercase form has clearly prevailed, although using the uppercase would be an acceptable style decision. My faith in human intelligence still hasn’t recovered from the development that followed: The predominant spelling among the general public has become ‘email,’ which is an abomination.”
I, too, prefer “e-mail” to “email,” but not to an extent that I would trot out words like “abomination” or insult the intelligence of my entire species.
Indeed, it seems that everywhere people are fuming over the audacity of e-mailers, bloggers, and chat-room visitors who shorten the word “are” to the letter “r,” the word “see” to the letter “c,” and so on.
But with all their freaking and all their wanking, the people who want to stop this trend are failing to see the truly significant language phenomenon taking place right before their eyes. What we are witnessing may be the first time in the history of the language that a communication form has prioritized the writer over the reader. Punctuation, as Truss, Walsh, and the others all so passionately point out, was created with the sole purpose of helping the reader clearly and quickly get the writer’s point. Ditto for grammar in general. Ditto for most rules of usage. They help the reader or listener understand. But the information-age shortcuts now shaping the language, which were foreshadowed by advertising shortcuts such as “drive-thru,” are designed exclusively for the writer’s convenience—at the reader’s expense. Because it’s time-consuming to scroll through characters on my two-way to spell “see,” I put the burden on the recipient to fill in the blanks as I write just “c.”
A problem? Well, no, as long as people understand this.
Use these shortcuts whenever you like as long as you’re aware of the fact that you’re making a demand on the reader. When sending an e-mail to the boss, you probably want to avoid writing “IM2CUTE2BTRU” (unless of course your job title is personal assistant to Justin Timberlake).
Technology presents some other language pitfalls as well, especially when it comes to etiquette. For example, in a chat room, THIS IS YELLING. So sometimes you’ll want to give the caps lock key a break.
Also, you might want to take note that sentences such as, “I saw your posting yesterday it was good but I disagreed with some of it I checked the link you referred to it wasn’t there,” might not be too well received by the reader. In other words, just because punctuation sometimes seems nonexistent on the Internet doesn’t mean that it’s obsolete.
As to the new vocabulary that accompanies our new technology, you might want to take note of the fact that official spellings change faster than you can Google “Paris Hilton and video.”
For example, AP finally faced reality by changing the official spelling from “Web site” to “website.” Of course, these are the same people who tried to hold back the “online” tide for years by insisting on a hyphen in “on-line.” The word “e-mail” continues to take a hyphen, despite Bill Walsh’s declaration that the entire human race has crashed its mental hard drive. And “dot-com” has no dot in it.
As for things like “e-solutions,” “cybersluts,” “phishing,” “pharming,” and “spamming,” well, there’s no real way to know what will be a “real” word tomorrow. We all have to struggle to keep up with the changing times. But take comfort in the fact that, in this realm, you’re way ahead of the grammar snobs who still cling desperately to a time when spell-checker and grammar-checker didn’t threaten their reason for living.