There are certain things you hear sitting in the back of a classroom you otherwise would not if you took up a more studious seat up front. As I was sitting against a back window in linguistics class the other day, the teacher began to write an exercise on the board. She arrived at a word she could not spell; in her defense, English is her second language. Or third. Anyway, she asked the class if they could help her out, and then I heard it. It was one of those self-mocking statements you say to the kid next to you in order get a laugh or two: “Ha, I don’t know,” he said in a husky whisper, “Word does that for me.” They both started to laugh, as if it was ludicrous that he would actually be expected to know how to spell. The word, as I recall, was “decision.” They sounded like idiots.
Now this seems inconspicuous at first glance, I will admit. Everyone takes advantage of computerized assistance every once and a while – by this point in my post I’ve probably already used the thesaurus six times. But this got me thinking about our culture’s massive vocabulary reformations: with ‘new age’ jargon, we hardly use real, conversational English words anymore, and thus, we do not know how to spell them.
M.T. Anderson wrote an entire book, Feed, that incorporated this ‘new age’ innovated language. When I listened to him speak (he came to Uconn this past fall) about the exciting new possibilities for language, that new words are being created everyday, it was so eloquent, I was almost won over. Therein lies a point, though: his eloquence won me over – all of those traditional, lovely long words that are currently undergoing extinction – ironically, those are what worked.
As an English major who has very little exposure to the internet languages that are replacing proper English, I suppose am a bit biased. But seriously, all of the abbreviations? Ttyl? That is no longer an “exciting possibility for new language,” that is just someone with lazy fingers. I could write that whole sentence in seven letters: tijswlf. Is that exciting? No, it’s confusing. And those abbreviations should never, ever be spoken. Unfortunately enough, I’ve heard them. If you have not, I hope you never have to. It is like someone heaving a dagger smack into the middle of a Webster’s dictionary. It’s dreadful.
And then there are the spelling differentiations, which is probably why two kids in my linguistics class admittedly do not know how to spell. I’ve come across spellings like “ya” instead of “you,” or worse, the single letter “u” instead of the same word, thus allowing me to hypothesize that this phenomenon was formed in the interest of saving time while typing. The English language still suffered, but I understood the reasoning. One word proved me wrong: Kewl. Meant to be “cool,” it disproved my theory that the disfiguration of our language was meant to save time. Kewl: four letters. Cool: four letters. This would mean, horrifically, that even though the writer of “kewl” spends the same amount of time spelling the word out that it would take to spell the correct word, he or she does it anyway, just because. What?
In my blog post that has apparently morphed into a manifesto, I’m calling to all English users: let us not sacrifice our language in the name of the internet, or of saving time, or because you secretly wish you were Noah Webster. I would argue that replacing words that already exist (see above: cool) with fictional words, in frank terms, makes you look stupid. There is no need. To be fair, if a word does not exist, say, there is no English word for the state of being both clean and dirty at the same time, then something like clirty or dirtean seems perfectly rational. (This, I think, would be categorized under an “exciting possibility for our language.”) What is not acceptable, though, is the alteration of spellings and the abbreviations of the current generation that have resulted in college students not being able to spell “decision.” Shameful. And by the way, I didn’t need spell check to do that one, I promise.