Butchering the English Language

[Big and Bashful]

Texting is killing formal language

If someone sends "u" instead of "you" in a text message, I immediately discount everything they have to say.

Me too, if they want to be taken seriously or at least not ignored they should at least try to spell fings corectly! There's a raison these things have smelling defectors and autocollect!

[Uncle Al]

Me too, if they want to be taken seriously or at least not ignored they should at least try
to spell fings corectly! There's a raison these things have smelling defectors and autocollect!

Uncle Al

[STEVIE]

Ach min, thon loonies and quinies wordies fair stammygaster me as weel.
Bit, aye mind ye were yung eence tae.
Yer dominies and fowks were likely skunnert wi yer didos n' a'.
Steve.
That is not just butchery it is more like mincing it to a pulp.

[Kirbstone]

Just open any random page of James Joyce's 'Finnegan's Wake' and struggle through it !
He won a Nobel Prize!

Tom

[STEVIE]

Just open any random page of James Joyce's 'Finnegan's Wake' and struggle through it !
He won a Nobel Prize!
Tom

I have just picked it up for the grand sum of 49p Tom.
Delivered to the old Kindle as we speak.
Struggle eh, I do love a challenge.
Just to reciprocate, you should try a "Scots Quair" by Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
Wonderful book really, but hard going.

Steve.

[rivegauche]

I found Joyce to be unreadable gibberish. On the other hand Sunset Song (first of the Scots Quair trilogy contains some of the most beautiful writing in the English language - look out for the passage where Chris describes the peewits. I do not come from an area where Scots is spoken and I had no difficulty with this book.

[rode_kater]

The written language is alive and well, it's just that there are ever fewer practitioners of it. It also remains one of the few things that sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.

This seems to be privileging certain types of writing, since if you include stuff like email/SMS/Twitter/Facebook/etc, there is more being written by more people than ever before. Just like when people say "nobody is reading any more" when they mean "nobody is reading books".

There is a debate to be had that by reading less books the level of reading comprehension is going down. Certainly there's an issue that people don't understand the letters they're receiving in the mail from businesses/government, and no amount of reading tweets/facebook posts is going to help there. The number of people who are barely or not literate in western societies is shocking. But I'm not convinced the issue is worse than before, it's just more visible now because if the increased use of writing everywhere.

[rivegauche]

The passage I mentioned from Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon is

So that was Chris and her reading and schooling, two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you'd waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you'd cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies

The language here is both beautiful and accessible. A peewit is a widely used Scottish name for a lapwing.

[crfriend]

[... I]f you include stuff like email/SMS/Twitter/Facebook/etc, there is more being written by more people than ever before. Just like when people say "nobody is reading any more" when they mean "nobody is reading books".

It is oft said that there's more being written, but vastly less said because of the low quality of the writing. The volume of categoric rubbish being produced nowadays boggles even the most fervent imaginations -- and I hope most of it is NOT being preserved for posterity unless as an object lesson in how not to do things.

E-mail can be vary well written, or it can look very much like a TXT screed. SMS/Twitter/Farcebook aren't even worthy of consideration.

How many people can actually sit down and write a letter (even on a keyboard)? (I'm actually thinking about getting re-trained in handwriting because the thought of sitting down with a blank page and hand writing a letter to someone just has a timeless charm to it.)

The number of people who are barely or not literate in western societies is shocking. But I'm not convinced the issue is worse than before, it's just more visible now because if the increased use of writing everywhere.

I suspect the level of literacy, and in this I refer to the fully literate who are capable of reading, comprehending, and writing, is almost certainly lower now than it was 50 years ago -- at least in the United States. The level of "functional illiteracy" is truly frightening, and the number of folks who can't even fill out a job application is truly horrifying. As I alluded to earlier, this may be by design --if the populace is hopelessly ignorant then they won't be able to ask "hard questions" that need asking now more than ever. Heck, it's getting difficult to even find proper documentation on how new things work; most of it is now pictograms and videos.

[trainspotter48]

Carl wrote

most of it is now pictograms and videos.

I'm glad someone else finds this infuriating.

[pelmut]

I remember reading that punctuation is very important ...

What is this thing called "love"?
versus
What is this thing called, Love?

[Coder]

How many people can actually sit down and write a letter (even on a keyboard)? (I'm actually thinking about getting re-trained in handwriting because the thought of sitting down with a blank page and hand writing a letter to someone just has a timeless charm to it.)

I found out - unfortunately in my last semester in college - that writing a paper by hand on paper was much quicker and my product was better than on the computer. I'm not talking A-grade material, but a vast improvement on my earlier assignments.

[crfriend]

I found out - unfortunately in my last semester in college - that writing a paper by hand on paper was much quicker and my product was better than on the computer. I'm not talking A-grade material, but a vast improvement on my earlier assignments.

I find that I am constrained to using a keyboard to communicate with in the written language for the simple expediency that even my printing is largely illegible to others (even I can have a hard time with it). However, these is great satisfaction to be had by going at the task in the Old School way. Computers, it is true -- and word-processors before that -- have dumbed things down a bit because it's so easy to go back and correct a gaffe; this has merely caused us to get "sloppy" which is a long way from being illiterate.

Composition is important, and I suspect we pay a little bit more attention to it if it's being committed to paper by our hand than we might when typing on a keyboard. That's a personal observation, and I do not know of any work or research into the matter.

Learning to write when I was little was a bit of a painful ordeal, but once I "got over the hump" on it and grasped the basics the real fun could begin, and I've not looked back. Another thing that helped immensely with that was learning that the written language is really very distinct from the spoken language, and that we can "do things" in the written language that cannot be conveniently done in the spoken one. Thus -- and the astute have noticed this -- when writing I use UK English although I am a US English speaker with such a bland accent that no-one has ever been able to successfully nail down where I hail from (it's what I term "Network American"). Why? Because I find that it helps me focus more on the composition before it takes shape on paper.

Literacy is important. I hope it does not go the way of the dodo bird.

[ScotL]

How many people can actually sit down and write a letter (even on a keyboard)? (I'm actually thinking about getting re-trained in handwriting because the thought of sitting down with a blank page and hand writing a letter to someone just has a timeless charm to it.)

I found out - unfortunately in my last semester in college - that writing a paper by hand on paper was much quicker and my product was better than on the computer. I'm not talking A-grade material, but a vast improvement on my earlier assignments.

I have the same “problem”. I can write as fast as I think but can’t type as fast. Creates a delay in my thoughts and the thoughts on paper that make a mess of them

[rode_kater]

I suspect the level of literacy, and in this I refer to the fully literate who are capable of reading, comprehending, and writing, is almost certainly lower now than it was 50 years ago -- at least in the United States. The level of "functional illiteracy" is truly frightening, and the number of folks who can't even fill out a job application is truly horrifying.

So you made me look it up for here (for the Netherlands). What we call being "functionally literate" are the reading/writing/arithmetic skills someone is expected to have after 4 years of secondary school, or about age 16. It's turns about that over the last 25 years the percentage of people who don't have that level has gone up from 9.5% to 12%. So yeah, it's gotten worse. Partially it's due to aging, which cuts literacy skills, so people who were borderline most of their lives become functionally illiterate eventually. But there are many students leaving school already functionally illiterate (around 5% apparently). The reasons are varied, but a common theme is that the parents aren't very literate and so the children don't get a good start and the school doesn't catch it before the kids leaves.

Fairly depressing all round.

Something to keep in mind though is compartmentalisation: people write differently depending on their target audience. And just because they write a particular way on twitter/whatsapp doesn't necessarily mean they always write that way.