"All you need is Mr Squiggles."
nuff said
"All you need is Mr Squiggles."
nuff said
«Masamuneehs on the outside, tasty on the inside.»
What?
«The original Masamuneehs.»
No shit! Who else would have a fucking name like that?
«I want Masamuneehs and I want it now.»
Now we're talking!
Humans are different from animals. We must die for a reason. Now is the time for us to regulate ourselves and reclaim our dignity. The one who holds endless potential and displays his strength and kindness to the world. Only mankind has God, a power that allows us to go above and beyond what we are now, a God that we call "possibility".
«There is no life without Phoenix.»
LMAO, this is so true
For all you awesome people, it's just Phoenix. The numbers are just the amount of times people misspell it.
sloganizer.net
«Suck it dry makes your day.»
you bet i do baby
Take two of these muchachos and call us in the morning. Yeah, call us, we'll be drunk.
I thought I'd bring this thread back, because I read a news article today that reminded me about an issue I've been thinking about for a while.
When I started university (ack, that's nearly 6 years ago now x_X) I wrote a paper on the effect of text forms and IM standards on how people speak and write the English language. At the time, there was much alarm from people who believed the language was degrading due to overused short forms and increased reliance on spell checkers. There hadn't been any studies done, so at that point it was mainly speculation. Now we're seeing the results of a generation who has grown up on instant messaging of all sorts. Those people who argued, "Kids use text speak, but it's only a dialect, and they know how to write properly when they need to," are finding that more and more kids can't use standard English when asked to. And it's not just spelling and grammar that are suffering.
This article details the result of a study done in Ireland.
The interesting thing to note is that the whole way that they write is being affected. Sentence structure and vocabulary are narrowing, becoming simpler and shorter. It will be interesting to see how the academic community chooses to deal with this. There are schools in Australia that are allowing students to use certain texting short forms on their exams. As much as a linguist I can objectively look at this and call it the natural evolution of the language, it makes me sad to see so much richness and expressiveness being lost. Sometimes, an emoticon just can't covey how you feel like a 10 letter word can.
I was seriously interested to see what you thought about this. It's pretty popular to bash on anyone even mildly supportive of prescriptive grammar, I'm finding.Originally Posted by KitKat
Also, I'm not surprised by that news in the least. I guess it's harder to enforce "proper" writing skills in a classroom when the kids are using AIM shortcuts and texting-slang on a day-to-day basis among their peers. Actually, I don't know whether to think of it as "slang" or not...and although there is probably some level of mutual intelligibility between kids and text messages and netspeak, it honestly pains me to have to read things like this nearly every single day:
I wonder after reading this, how many people actually could read through that and understand it clearly? Perhaps there are even different "dialects" of internet writing?Group Info Name: girls who are jealous
Type: Common Interest - Age
Description: This is for the girls that start krapp about girls being whores okay listen here you need too stop this krapp when you are pretty you are going too dresss up & wear short skirts thats if you have the body & these chicks that started this krapp needs too be hit with a little reality you need too get over it okay & you need to learn the definition of whore kk got it & if you want too talk krapp about us go ahead you are just making girls that are pretty more famous you should just live life the way you got it god blessed you with a life so live it & stay out of other people's life
Last edited by XanBcoo; Mon, 04-30-2007 at 03:25 PM.
<@Terra> he told me this, "man actually meeting terra is so fucking big", and he started crying. Then he bought me hot dogs
honestly, i stopped reading after 4 lines. it causes me physical pain trying to read stuff like that.
I got a brain tumor and lost my ability to read after one third through.
I consider myself lucky as it spared me from the rest of it.
If these girls are 12 they shouldn't be on facebook (I strongly doubt they have parental permission, considering the kind of groups that exist on facebook). Anyway, that article has brought a very interesting issue to my attention. With the proliferation of eEverything younger and younger people are now able to reach out and interact further from home than ever before. Now where this becomes interesting is in commmunication skills. One of the many reasons you can't get a job or go off on your own at that young an age (in most Western countries at least) is because most kids don't know how to communicate properly by that time. This girl is twelve and apparently from Maryland (my state), which means she's had probably 6-7 years of formal education at best, with at least two of those being 'building years' where they just rehashed old stuff. When you look at her writing it's not surprising that she writes like a middle schooler...because she is one.
I think part of this problem is on the majority of people online who are old enough to know a little bit. I think we tend to hold all users to a standard which coincides with about an average 16-18 year old in a developed country with mandatory schooling for all children. The way this affects comunication is still unknown, but I think it's highly possible that what Kitkat is worried about may come to pass. Bolstered by their ability to communicate effectively online with limited knowledge kids might be harder to train in proper language because they can use their pseudo language so effectively amongst themselves and others online. Practice makes perfect, and with the medium of communication shifting from verbal to typed it's possible that languages will be forced to adapt to more keyboard friendly forms.
Yeah, this pretty much what I was said as well, and clearly it's the case. It's gotten to the point where when I talk to some of my cousins on MSN who text-message all the time, they substitute words and phrases for text-slang when it's not even necessary to shorten the word. They've just gotten used to it, and they're regular writing has changed to fit that.
Pity, because like my example above, the result is pretty incomprehensible.
Here is where I disagree with you. When I was at least 10, I could write more clearly than that. Think of all the essays you had to write in between 5th and 8th grade. The problem is not because she hasn't been taught how to write properly, it's because her everyday conversation (online, or texting, or whatever) interferes with the teaching. I mean, the article KitKat posted is pretty sparse on details (it might just be a bunch of bad English teachers playing the blame-game), but apparently kids are having trouble separating their formal and informal writing.This girl is twelve and apparently from Maryland (my state ), which means she's had probably 6-7 years of formal education at best, with at least two of those being 'building years' where they just rehashed old stuff. When you look at her writing it's not surprising that she writes like a middle schooler...because she is one.
What pisses me off is that it doesn't even have any regularity to it, so it's not like slang. It's just jumbled. For every 10 kids who write like that, you have to go through and (painstakingly) figure out what they're trying to say. Or maybe I'm coming down too hard and just need to accept the change. I dunno.
<@Terra> he told me this, "man actually meeting terra is so fucking big", and he started crying. Then he bought me hot dogs
"Accept the change," huh?
In this case, I find it extremely difficult to take in the perspective of the "other side," simply because it is clearly not progress.
KIMOCHI~II
Dunno. While I would never want to accept a change that huge, still the written language changes. My favorite example is Lord of the Rings. If you compare it to modern fantasy novels, there's quite a difference. Now, it has been said Tolkien didn't write exactly main stream language, but nevertheless he was a professor of the English language and literature.
Still, I highly doubt any of us will live to see a day when that manner of AIM and miserable teenager blog language will appear on the pages of newspapers, books, magazines, operation manuals and such. In the end, most people never need to write official publications. People of higher education inevitably need to create articles, presentations, and papers during education and later work, but even so their particular language only needs to be good enough to be perfectly understandable and clear and able to convey the message (except for those specializing in literature, which might have totally different requirements).
So, even if those problematic people never learn to write properly, they can still read properly as much as they need, and above all, they can keep communicating with their brethren using their new, broken language.
I agree with the whole chat language thing, but I also think that less and less kids are reading books is also a factor. People get their vocabulary from there. They also improve their style of writing too.
I completely agree with this post. I used to read a book a week or two and now I have not read a book in a few months. The main reason is I have not found one that really captures my interest since Ender's Game. I need to get back into reading, I believe my vocabulary and conversational skills are suffering greatly from the lack of books. I have found that the movie and anime versions of a lot of todays reading materials have become more dominant and less ancillary (Thank you to todays vocabulary lesson in school) to the reading material in my day to day life. I guess the next step in my process is to ask if anyone could recommend a book for me. Figure it will be comparable to Ender's Game and just as capturing.
If you liked the existential aspects of Ender's Game (the stuff in the game, the question of whether it's okay to wipe out an entire species) read the next three books of the Ender series (Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind). If you like the wits and strategy aspect read the Bean books (Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, and Shadow of the Giant).
I remember distinctly starting Ender's Shadow, but I never got into it. I might go out and try Speaker for the Dead or that line of books next time I am out near the bookstore.
Xan, you're right about the inconsistency, I hadn't thought about that before. It also seems to me that each online or regional community spawns its own written dialects that people will go and use elsewhere, but will mean nothing to their readers. As an example, I once used the word 'Hax' as a joke in a powerpoint presentation, and one of the questions I got at the end was, "What is hax?" No one in my class knew. In the past, dialects developed only within physical regions, so as language changed, it changed as a whole for villages, provinces, or countries. With global communication possible, we're seeing dialects among people with similar interests, but who live physically very far apart, which could cause confusion and fragmentation of regional language.
As for the Facebook example Xan posted, one of the things that makes it so hard to read is that there are no sentences. Even when I was in Grade 1 I could write in sentences. I never saw any writing that wasn't sentences, so it never even occurred to me to write otherwise. When communication becomes conversational, as in IM and texts, sentences get blurred out. Although the paragraph might make sense when read aloud, it's horrific to attempt to read. This is definitely a new development in writing from when we were that age.
Oh, and I agree wholeheartedly with gr3atfull. Books are so important, and the level of writing online rarely compares to that of good published literature. When I went to university I didn't have time to read anymore, and the difference was blatantly obvious in my writing as a result, even over such a relatively short time period. *shakes fist at engineering*
I think it's a good point that you bring up Ender's game specifically. If you read the chapter where he returns to Earth to visit with Valentine, or any of the books in the Shadow series, all the trainees in Battle School developed their own slang, to the point that most people on Earth had difficulty understanding them. It was a multilingual slang, jeesh, the exclusive use of "bugger" over "Formics" and a lot of simple words taken from Japanese, Spanish (Bonso's influence) a lot of Portuguese, and middle eastern/southeast asian dialects, the last one especially in the Shadow series. Then reading the last 3 of the Ender saga (Speaker, Xenocide, Children of the Mind), a couple of the terms were incorporated for millennia.
It's always been the same. The English language, (and presumably others as well) has been under a long chain of compressions and simplifications. We all use a lot more contractions than people did in the 18th century. We use more than the people in the 1950's for that matter. Just compare a Shakespearian insult to an equivalent one. "Beauty starv'd with [your] severity Cuts beauty off from all posterity." and "You're ugly and your kids will be." Granted, Shakespeare is not exactly colloquial language of that time, but it is a fairly good indicator. Our words have always gotten progressively shorter, and we can convey our ideas in fewer words.
Yes, it does tend to grant less specific meanings to any idea, and it sure as hell doesn't sound as good, but it is just development. Consider American English to Oxford English. Since Webster rewrote our dictionary, the two variants have become considerably divergent. Beyond not spelling color with a 'u', the colloquial languages use dramatically different subsets of words. It's the same for Australian English. It's not hard (typically) for well read and educated people to perfectly understand what is being said, but I can't understand heavy British slang when it's covered with a thick accent unless I concentrate really hard. It's the same in Japanese, with thick Hiroshima and Kansai dialects compared to the Kanto dialect.
Overall, there is a bit of a dumbing down, but it's not much more than the slow infection of pop culture, as it has always been over the years.
I always make time to read something, even with my engineering workload. I can thank a strong case of bibliophilia for that. Manga and online literature takes the place when I don't have time for a physical book.
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