The Disappearance of Sensuality in the English Language

Over half a century ago, George Orwell said that the English language was in a bad state (2259). It still is. As many scientists have believed about the sun, the English language is shrinking. To be more specific, its words are being more and more condensed as time goes by. The condensation of the English language is due to the extreme use of acronyms as well as other forms of abbreviation. Especially here in the United States, since we are a fast pace society, we seem to like to abbreviate everything. Much of this is due to our extreme use of television and computer technology and the commercialization of both. We like things simple and instantaneous. Television and computer media conveys information in these two ways. Use of such media is a result of our attitude towards thinking. Most of us do not like to think (although after reading this article, I hope it will be apparent to you that I'm one of the few who do, since a lot of thought would have gone into it!). Rather, we simply like to take in information that we are given. So the abbreviating of words conveys information faster to us. Through abbreviation, we can skip over the long spelling of certain names and titles and simply initial them. For example, instead of spelling the full name "Alcoholics' Anonymous" we can initial it "AA". Initialing gets across the message faster. However, the overuse of abbreviations, especially acronyms, is a threat to not just the English language but also the very human experiences and cultures that the English language has grown out of.

It must be admitted that all words in the English language are abbreviated to some extent. Our system of language is so complex and highly developed that we don't need a single word to each idea and experience. Each word, in a way, summarizes a number of ideas and experiences. It is linked to a multitude of ideas, experiences and histories (Schuster 460). One seemingly simple word can hold a multitude of ideas based on experiences, culture and history. For instance, the word "process" doesn't simply refer to the steps performed for a particular result. There are several other meanings behind it that pertain to the individual histories and cultures and thus experiences that word grew out of. These meanings range from scientific ones to legal ones. In addition to that, there are several parts of speech, such as the noun and verb tenses, that "process" is used as and therefore varying the word's meaning at least slightly. Also the word "process" derives from several different languages and therefore cultural and historical contexts; it derives from Latin, to Old French, to Middle English and then finally to British, Canadian ("process") and American English. To list every word that refers to each of these meanings to convey the overall meaning of "process" would slow down the conveyance of certain messages when trying to use this word.

Slowing conveyance down in this way would hinder advancement of our society since it would hinder the speaker/writer from coming up with important ideas. Think about just one word such as "process". This single word has an entire history of words that it developed from and that derive from several different languages, and that carry different meanings. To use every single word from the history of "process" any time we want to use it in speech or writing would make a conversation or piece of writing way too long. Thinking would also be prolonged because several different words would be used to convey one meaning. Therefore writing and speech would slow down, and so ideas would come across much more slowly slowing down the thinking of the people involved in the speech or writing. Therefore there would be a stalling of the advancement of society which all people's thoughts through their words contribute to. So it is true that language, somewhat inevitably, already condenses words, and rightfully so, as it evolves.

Most abbreviated words, especially acronyms, do not convey the experiences, cultures and histories they derive from. Therefore they lose their sense of the humanity that they grow out of. However, acronyms are useful for extremely long titles and names, especially of companies, organizations and government institutions. For instance, it would be hell to repetitively say "National Aeronautics and Space Administration" rather than "NASA" anytime we needed to mention that particular institution in a single conversation, speech or piece of writing. Besides, today, and perhaps for many more years to come, NASA is so popularly known for its study and space exploration that it is one of those acronyms that do convey concrete images and experiences such as those of space flight and thus the stars and planets. Also, some acronyms are useful as emblems for certain companies or organizations they represent, such as the big "AC" for Associated Content© and "MGM" for Metro-Goldwyn Mayer. However, the overuse of acronyms thatare an actual threat to the English language's conveyance of experiences and cultural and historical elements are those acronyms used in those aspects of consumer culture that are much more exposed, such as chain stores' business signs.

Our consumer culture demands products and services to be produced quickly. Society in the United States is very time oriented and so everything has to be done fast, all for the sake of success, especially monetary success. We want the higher speed internet. We want to lose weight in only a matter of days and so we turn to Jenny Craig. Yet we want our meals in a matter of minutes so we either use our microwaves or we go to a fast food restaurant. We are no longer, for the large part, willing to take the time to cook for ourselves. This desire for immediate satisfaction, including the satisfaction of making a larger salary within months rather than having to earn it through work and effort over a course of years, is a major factor in the condensing of language. If shortened words can enable one to read text more quickly, or if they can help one convey the message faster by speaking or writing it, so much the better. Therefore abbreviated words help us to get on with other more "meaningful" tasks. The commercial industry makes use of such words through television and computer technology, especially the internet.

Many people make purchases from televised ads and, even more now than ever, from the internet. Television's ads must present things quickly using as few words as possible and relying more on images, since most viewers incline towards imagery more than they do words. Like television, internet must do the same with its ads. One of its major advantages over television is that it uses hyperlinks to give us faster access to the information we want. In addition to this, purchases made on the internet deliver much faster than ones made by postal mail, plus the items of these purchases are a lot cheaper especially when compared to prices in the traditional stores. As with many television viewers, many internet viewers get impatient reading text, and so almost every internet or computer tech term in general is condensed into a smaller version, especially into an acronym. For example, we have "blog" for "web log", "CPU" for "Central Processing Unit", "RAM" for "Random-access-memory" and of course "www" for "world wide web".

However, the abbreviating of names and titles is not so much a problem with the internet and computer technology than it is with the literacy of the commercial businesses' advertising. Many businesses' names that originally appealed to the senses have been condensed to cold, abstract acronyms. This is particularly happening in many fast food chains and other kinds of stores. Kentucky Fried Chicken is now referred to as KFC both in its ads and on its business signs. Because of this, we don't get the sense of a food product that started in a particular region of the United States in a particular culture, and therefore there is no sensual reference in the acronym of the store's name; there are simply abstract letters. Another example of this condensing of words in the fast food industry is Dairy Queen. The store's sign and ads simply bare the initials DQ. Even the voice over on Dairy Queen's television commercials pronounces the chain's name by its initials. Thus we lose that sensation of creamy dairy products that originated in the milking of cows in a more rural/agricultural society. Initialing the store's name also detaches from the name itself the reference to the business's malt shop-like beginnings of an earlier era, an era when young people gathered at such places for social and thus more (pop) cultural purposes rather than just to purchase and consume food. The name also loses the sense for the food products' superior taste indicated in the store's "royal" title, "Queen". Not only has the "Queen" in "Dairy Queen" been dethroned by the initialing of the name, but the "King" in "Burger King" is beginning to be dethroned as well. Many people at large are beginning to refer to Burger King as BK.

Fast food isn't the only industry condensing its names to mere letters of abbreviation. International House of Pancakes has had its name initialed to "IHOP". Many of you readers born in the 1980s and later probably never even knew until now that there was an International House of Pancakes! So as with Kentucky Fried Chicken and Dairy Queen, the concreteness of delicious food, in this case buttered hot cakes covered in syrup, is drowned out with the initialing of the restaurant's name. So is Taco Bell going to contract the acronym epidemic as well? Will it get "TB" in place of its spelled out name that reflects the crisp corn tortillas baked by the Indians and priests of the old missions of Mexico? If something like that were to happen I'd sure like to see how much business Taco Bell would be making. I sure as hell would rather be eating tacos than be in a hospital for treatment of tuberculosis!

Sure, the ads show photo images of fried chicken, hamburgers stacked with moist beef, creamy milkshakes and Sundays among other delicious foods. And yes, images are a form of communication. Imagery is a very significant form of communication and always has been since before recorded history. However, written communication is just as important because it is what develops our ability to think logically and clearly so we can explain things orally in these two manners. And yes, the system of writing itself is much more abstract than pictorial images. However, its greatest, most effective use is when it is used to describe things concretely to help form images in our minds. We need to think about what we see rather than just absorb it. Therefore worded imagery helps us to talk and write intelligently about what we see. To emphasize photographic imagery, such as on a menu, over worded imagery is to contribute to a slow but sure decrease in society's literacy.

The fully spelled out names of food services indicate more than the type of food such services specialize in. The food served at a restaurant is not simply a stock of retail products. It has historical and cultural beginnings and influences. Therefore we should want to remember what kind of culture our parents and grandparents ate out of since much of today's food services grew out of their times. Why not commemorate those beginnings by keeping the full descriptive names of these businesses? When we give our food services' mere acronyms for names, we are trivializing the food products, reducing them to things that simply fill our stomachs and satisfy our taste buds rather than fill our heads with the awareness of the culture and society such products grew out of. We estrange such services and products from the very history and cultures they began in. Thus we estrange ourselves from those history and cultures.

The abbreviation of names isn't just a problem with the food service industry. A hardware chain that bore the name Orchard Supply Hardware, a name that depicts working in shady orchards on a warm spring or even a hot summer day, now simply bears the initials OSH. Such an acronym makes home and gardening look simply like a mechanical function to be performed as quickly and thoughtlessly as possible, rather than to be performed with care and satisfaction for the sake of a person's own shelter or yard. It makes such tasks look like mere chores that need to be dealt with in the quickest ways possible rather than an enjoyable engagement with one's own yard or house. In addition to this, it makes the business look like a mere matter of monetary and goods exchange rather than a matter of the cultivation of nature that the business grew out of. Therefore "OSH" loses the concrete, cultural essence unlike "Orchard Supply Hardware".

The other industry being effected by extensive initialing is the movie industry. Movies are beginning to lose their titles. In many of the third X-Men movie's promotional materials, such as its advertisement posters and TV ads, the title X-Men III has simply been cut down to X III. The "III" is represented by three of the Wolverine's adamantium (metallic) claws extended up in front of the cold metallic looking "X". Pictorially this is really creative, but why not spell out "X-Men" and then extend the three claws at the end of that? This kind of abbreviation has not been enough for the second and third Spider-Man movies. In the second and third films, the promotional materials simply bear the numbers of the sequels near a large image of Spider-Man without even an "S". The new Fantastic Four movie, now out in theaters, is in a similar situation. Although the promotional poster bears the fully spelled out title, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, it does so in very small lettering at the bottom, the number four (for "Fantastic Four") inside of the large circle (which make up the team's icon) looming above in the background. It is great to have the graphics, such as the Spider-Man image and the Fantastic Four's icon. Graphic images support text well, especially for film promotional material. However, reducing a movie's title to a mere number loses the literacy of such material and thus contributes to the loss of literacy throughout society as does the initialing of food services' business titles.

As you may have noticed, the movies mentioned above are adaptations of super hero comic books. When we were kids many of us read comic books. As they did to our own reading skills, such books contribute to those of today's children. After nursery rhyme picture books, and books based on today's cartoons and Disney animated movies, comic books are supposed to influence children to continue reading and to read at higher levels regardless of the fact that such books don't substitute for regular books. The initialing of these movies' titles is only diminishing the sense of literacy of the comic books they are derived from. It is also drowning out the nostalgia of reading a comic book as a kid. The comic books of the super heroes mentioned above have almost always bared the full, spelled out name of the super hero/super hero team on the front covers. When their movie adaptations' titles are initialed the atmosphere of the comic book itself is cut off. Thus the literate concreteness of a form of pop culture, the comic book, disappears from these titles, and therefore the very experience of that culture becomes absent.

Not only are movies becoming mere numbers but so are our meals. Returning to the topic of the fast food industry, the combo meals are identified on the overhead menu by numbers more than by words. For example, a combo meal of a double cheese burger, fries and a cola is simply identified as the number one combo, whereas the second combo item on the menu consisting of let's say a chicken sandwich, fries and a cola is simply referred to as the number two combo, and so on. The meals' descriptive names, such as the double cheese burger combo, or the chicken sandwich combo, are in very small lettering and the numbers are jumbo in size; the rest is simply "described" by a larger-than-life photographic illustration of the meal. Therefore a cold, abstract number is dominant over the sensual worded description. As far as language goes, this is an indication that the English language is losing its sense of human experience and therefore human sensuality. Sure we can mentally sense these meals through the overhead menu's photographic images of them. But most of us do this too passively and too unconsciously because the meals are not emphasized in printed language, in which the printed word, as with the spoken one, is what makes us actively think. Subordinating the names of these meals may seem like it is only a trivial problem in the food service industry. However, as with most pop culture, it can easily influence the more literate aspects of culture such as school textbooks which are already filled with large numbers of illustrations. However, such an influence may eventually lead to school textbooks becoming a pictorial dominated medium like Life Magazine. Therefore, if we have to "think" and communicate in terms of numbers and mere pictures as we would in terms of acronyms, our language and minds will no longer be those of humanity but of machines. Machines may have sensors, but they do not have sensuality. In other words, machines don't feel.

Consumerism has done what it has for years: turned products and services into mere tokens of profit rather than pieces of cultural experience. It does play on our sensations but more through photographic images than worded and hand drawn/painted ones. Even worst, it has abstracted language with its abbreviating of names and titles and so has taken the experience based worded imagery out of it. Because of this, literacy in pop culture will disappear. If we are not careful, the very sensuality that we find in our restaurant food and our favorite films will also disappear due to this abstracting of language. Our hamburgers, cherry colas and fries, our fried chicken and mashed potatoes, our tacos and refried beans will have no words for their tastes. We will only think of these meals in terms of numbers matched with pictures, a very similar way to how we think of their businesses as mere acronyms. Can you taste a number? Can you taste an acronym?

SOURCES:

Orwell, George. "Politics and the English Language." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M.H. Abrams. Vol. 2. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986. 2259.

"process." Webster's New World Dictionary. 2^nd college ed. 1986.

Schuster, Charles I. "Mikhail Bakhtin as Rhetorical Theorist." Cross-Talk In Comp Theory: A Reader. Ed. Victor Villanueva, Jr. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1997. 460.