.should ‘through’ be spelled ‘thru’, ‘tonight’ be ‘tonite’ and ‘see you’ now ‘c u’?
The children leading this revolt don’t care but should we? Superficially the answer is of course, yes – in PR speak: how and what you write depends on the stakeholders you are communicating with, and in which medium – a challenge we in this office, like many others, are facing daily with our social media and SOE offering. So ‘tonite’ works in a social media communication, but not a brief to a politician. Right?
But there’s a much deeper conversation.
There was a debate in the respected Atlantic Monthly last year, for and against the question, “Is Google making us Stupid?”. It has now been followed by a survey of about 900 experts, conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center.
In summary most experts said Google won’t make us stupid: 76% agreed with the statement, “By 2020, people’s use of the Internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information they become smarter and make better choices.”
But the survey also found that most thought reading, writing, and the rendering of knowledge will be improved: 65% agreed with the statement “by 2020 it will be clear that the Internet has enhanced and improved reading, writing and the rendering of knowledge.” 32% of the respondents expressed concerns that by 2020 “it will be clear that the Internet has diminished and endangered reading, writing and the rendering of knowledge.”
For traditionalists this revolution is unsettling. But I offer this – the last time that English evolved this quickly might have been back when book publishing was invented in the 1400’s. Before then there were numerous English dialects and many in England had difficulty understanding each other. It was a mess. Melvyn Bragg in his wonderful book, The Adventure of English, explains the diversity of spelling in that era. For instance, back then the word ‘people’ could be spelt ‘peple’, ‘pepule’, ‘pepul’, pepull’, pepulle’, ‘pepille’, ‘pepil’, pepylle’, pepyll’, peepple’, people’, poepul’, puple’, pupile’, pupill’, pupyll’, pupul’, or ‘pople’. As we all know spelling has been unified, but not yet the accents.
It’s the same these day and if you’re learning English as a second language, as hundreds of millions of people are right now, you probably think the English language could do with a serious spell-check, as spelt/spelled out here:
[quote ]We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes; But the plural of ox should be oxen not oxes. One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese, Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.[/quote]
[quote ]If I spoke of my foot and showed you my feet, When I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet? If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth, Why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?[/quote]
[quote ]The masculine pronouns are he, his and him, But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim! If you’re Russian or Chinese and you are trying this to sort, You’ll agree it’s all Greek, double-Dutch, and totally fraught.[/quote]
We r in a rare period in histry when skoolees r not only l3arnng 3nglish but reinventng it! WTF
And p3rhaps we ned 2 acept that w3r bng taught by our childr3n – itz a chaleng 4 us proz!1!1! OMG LOL
