The Demise of the Written Word?

There is nothing that bothers be more than seeing a sign that reads, "Now Open on Sunday's!" or reading the subject line of email from a nationally recognized magazine, "Seven Reasons Your Overweight."

Quite arrogantly, while I expect adults with a minimum of a late elementary school education to uphold a certain grammatical standard, I find myself making similar mistakes. It's more often than not that I will have proof-read a piece a multitude of times, finally accept the writing as perfect, hit publish, and find a mistake.

It drives me crazy.

Nonetheless, I strive for grammatical perfection. And in addition to this self-induced expectation, it took me quite sometime to get onto the texting bandwagon. Because what I would want to say simply took too long to type out, I would avoid the whole production.

Once the teenager entered the scene with her own cell phone in hand, I realized the gift I was missing.

Fast forward a few years and I am quite the text-diva. I would rather text than talk any day. And yes, it is always grammatically correct.

Then, I started to question what texting was doing to our language. When I started to get texts that contained "words" like shud (should); ur(you're); u(you), I worried that the written word as we know it would cease to exist or at the very least make a drastic change.

We know that language changes. When was the last time that you used words such as: thine, ye, hath, or thy? Moreover, new words emerge and are added to the dictionary. The Oxford Dictionary recently announced that the following works would be added to the next addition. We can now officially use words like defriend, cheeseball, and frenemy.

As I thought about what texting could be doing to our language, I thought back to when I was my children's age. Way back when, we didn't have texting, let alone cell phones. If we wanted to tell our friends something, we had to (gasp!) write a note. Most of the time, these notes would be passed during class or in the hall. They would need to be written-- as well as read-- on the fly, so quite a bit of short- hand was used. The only goal of the note was to get an idea across.

Just like the text messages of today.

So now I look forward to the day when my kids, as adults and parents themselves, complain that their kids are going to "be the ruin of society" all the while using correct grammar and punctuation.

Source:

news.gather.com; "New Words Added To The Dictionary: Supporting Slang In The English Language".August 20, 2010