[rainmaker]

Originally posted by Back In The Saddle

English is a living, breathing, working, evolving language. It is, I believe, the largest language ever to exist on the planet. It is also one of the more daunting languages to learn.

It constantly borrows from other languages to keep up with the world we live in. Words that are one part of speech morph to become another. The formality in our language is being discarded along with other forms of disused formalism in our culture and society. We lament that children are not being taught to call adults Mr. This or Mrs. That, yet we can't decide if we should have one last name, or two with a hyphen, or none at all!

The rising generation are communicating, exploring thoughts and ideas and their world, and just plain chillin' in ways and words and using technologies that didn't exist when we there their age. We may have been groovy or hip or cool or awesome or phat as teens, all terms that our parents certainly felt would be the death of the English language. But it's not just young people on IM that are driving the current evolution.

Have a listen around the office tomorrow. Ask yourself how many terms your industry has contributed to the language. How many of them are jargon, names of things that never existed before or are pure business-speak or techno-babble? Then there is the endless parade of TLAs. English is one of the few (or maybe only) languages that use them. Yet we don't just use them, we embrace them and make them words all on their own.

Twenty years ago people corresponded, now they just shoot emails across the wire. To remain a viable means of communication, English must remain responsive to the changing world we live in, or it must be replaced. It must allow us to communicate at a pace that matches the life we live. For that to happen, it must becoming simpler and less rigid. We're moving into a world where good communication is more valued than proper English.

It's not like English is some kind of poster child for elegant, clean, sensible languages. It's full of bizarre contradictions, anachronistic constructs, strange rules, exceptions to those rules, unusual syntax and grammar and is so complex that a person can dedicate a lifetime to it's study. Where did all of this linguistic cruft come from? From the evolution that has already taken place. And we worry that today's youth will ruin the language?

The point may be moot. In the future "writing" may look very little like it does today. More and more written communication is enhanced, even conducted, with audio, images, animations and other illustrations that add context and meaning. Some of it is already a such an integral part of our culture that here on the board we slap folks around when they make humorously intentioned attacks on others without including a .

Plus contemporary English communication often involves an intangible context that is impossible to translate into formal language. Sarcasm, for example, is unique to English, is widespread in our culture and yet finds no definitive expression in the written language. It's much more clearly communicated with a

Just think, a hundred years from now somebody may find something you wrote today, and it'll read to them like Shakespeare read to you the first time. If they can read it at all.

PS. We already have Old English and Middle English. What will future generations call what we speak today? English 3.0, perhaps?

I agree with you to a certain point, but too often these days I hear a teen say, "Well, you know what I mean?" and I really have no clue. And it's usually obvious that even other teens listening have no idea. Sometimes, I'm not even sure that the teen who said it knows what he or she means.

Language is just a way of putting thoughts out to be shared. When the thoughts are confused it shows up in the language. When the language is confused or inappropriate or mis-used, the listener doesn't really know what the intentions of the speaker are. This separates us from one another, and prevents society from growing.

This isn't to say we should all go back to the proper English of the 50's. I don't think that. But we do need to be careful that in throwing out the overly-rigid legalisms of the prunes-and-prisms English teachers of the past, we don't also eliminate the useful structure and rules that make communication possible.

Good grief, this is the third or fourth lecture on proper English that I've posted on the board this week. What is going on?!?