Slashdot Mirror
Literacy Limps Into the Kill Zone
Ant writes to tell us that Wired has an interesting look at the current standards of writing and the general decline of spelling and grammar in today's "comic book generation." The author blames many of the problems on instant or near-instant communications stating that the slang developed is essentially eroding our ability to formulate coherent thoughts in writing when called upon to do so.
wur r they talkin abt? lol g2g cya
all u haf 2 do iz read /. 4 a perfect xample of this
What they don't realise is language changes. every generation gets this and when it happens someone will come up and say literacy is going down. George orwell even did it in 1940, said there were problems, said there were people writing bad english, said they wouldn't be able to communicate soon. Well look at what we have here, a world still functioning nearly 70 years later. Also, a roman once said the same thing or a greek. That the young people of today are a generation that look down on the world and are showing no moral principels or showing problems with language and spelling and all the hoo haa he could drag up. And this was BC.
I think these people are old thinkers stuck in a new world where communication has changed and any seventy year old would tell you they find it hard to communicate with youth but no 20 year old ever will, and it's the 20 year olds who are the future. Always.
there is always paranoia about "declining communication skills." At the same time there are always contradicting studies showing how language skills are actually increasing. Langauge and usage is always being analyzed way too much.. language is what it is. It is a method of communicating thoughts and ideas with others. As long as we understand each other there is nothing "wrong" and we are devolving or whatever these people seem to think. language exists because we created it for our benefit. People who can't accept that language evolves and branches off for different purposes are close-minded and ignorant to reality.
YWARS AOG, EH NIGHYT NEWS 3DITRO 4TT H NEEWSPAPER WHEe I WROKED GOT UPSET WHEN HS FDR1VOLOUYZ STROY JUDGMENt WASQ U3STIO|\|3D BY NAOTEHR EDITOR!!!!11~~~~~~ hax0 the plznnet!!!11~~~~~~ "e ca iEtheR put uot a histroy booi kro a Comic book, he saifd, t4k1ng a dEfensive sw2ipE at a reblelioys strand of ahir.. lolooolololol "i Know which one i"m purtt1ng out. he wa clearly a mAn 4head o his time... LOLOLOLOLOLO!!11~~~~~ oloololo welcome to teh coMic-book genarati0n,, teh post--lITerate soceity!!!1~~~ the sToeris th4tt ecited my news editors imagiunation then -- teh 0nez ppa0XRed wtihl urid seXr, vspid cxelebrity shenaniganz, fallem idols -- r marekty teh plat du jour of jOUtnalsm these days!!111~~ (hmm had to edit as lameness filter triggered so thing about *10 exlacamation marks)
You know, the guy with the 'u' phobia and the 'z' fetish.
Indeed. But why does this not surprise me?
Why go far, look right here on Slashdot. These are geeks, supposedly the folks who're "smarter" than the average population.
And even here, instead of accepting grammatical and spelling mistakes, people would rather flame you for correcting them. Not to mention the piss-poor quality of writing that most Slashdotters (and the editors) have. If you can follow the rules in a programming language, why is it so hard to do so for a natural language?
Personally, if folks do not communicate in good English, I'd simply not respond - be it IM, SMS or e-mail. And guess what? Most folks talk a lot better English when they're communicating with me, simply because they know that they'd not get a response - or that they'd get their English corrected.
I do not care if you are using e-mail, IM or SMS, use that period and use that apostrophe. Use appropriate and proper punctuation, capitalization, spelling and grammar, else I'm simply not talking to you.
That needs to be the general attitude, if we want to see any semblance of Good English (TM) exist in the next few generations.
Seriously, encourage your kids to look up that dictionary. Encourage them to read good literature, aside from the pop crap that exists today. Encourage them to write, to put down their thoughts. The only way you are going to develop writing skills is by writing.
Aye stihl r3c411 teh dayz wen id uze "1337' tawk online. Butt now I noh betre, becuz eventuahlie joo mahture and lern 2 stawp duing it.
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
I couldn't agree more. However, it's not just a case of me getting frustrated at the apparent lack of schooling of the people with whom I'm interacting. Nor is it just a case of language evolving. No, it's reaching the point where I'm genuinely struggling to understand what people are saying. As an example, I see an increasing number of people writing "no" when they mean "know". Since my brain is conditioned to associate a completely different meaning to the word "no", I have to do a double take before I can work out what they meant. When combined with a total absence of punctuation, I'm left wondering how the generation of today manage to communicate with each other at all, let alone with others.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Goerge was wrong.
So instead of double speek in 1984, we get half speek in 2006.
As more and more of the reading I do comes from blogs, comments, and other web-based, unedited communications, I find myself making more and more errors. These are spelling and grammar and sound-alike (their vs there) mistakes that I would never have made years ago, when most of my exposure to written language came from carefully vetted print. A downside of the immediacy of the Internet is that there is little time or inclination to edit and double-check. The resulting degeneration of the language is noticeable. I don't know how to reverse it, but it is pretty embarassing when I make such basic, I-should-know-better mistakes. And I cringe when I see them creeping into more formal communications (signs, etc) as well.
The generation of young people who are currently ruining spelling and grammar rules are children of the comic book generation, if not grandchildren. Slangs develop for a reason, but this reason must be with the communication of other people. A better explanation of forming slangs is the increasing disconnection between the older generation and younger generation. The disconnect stems from many things including broken families, fewer job opporutities for teenagers, and the increasing age of professionalism. Some people simply decide that the extra wait is not worthwhile, and adolecents work to communicate with their undereducated peers. You see this phenomenon in some of the most prominent hobbies, such as car repair/performance modification, and in video game console repair/modification.
Sometimes parents need to understand that they give their children advice, AND an environment. The child may listen to advice, but will not be able to avoid paying attention to their environment. The environment in this case has nothing to do with comic books however.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I thought that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis had been written off by linguists?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Sorry, nerds, but if you choose Superman over Faulkner you are wasting your life.
What this gentleman seems to overlook is that there was never any past period where literacy was widespread and all the world's (and by the world, I of course mean Western Europe) inhabitants were essayists and poets? Did I somehow miss the era of an entire civilization of Donnes and Popes?
Perhaps the gentleman should reflect on the possibility that grammar has never been a high priority for the masses. Perhaps he should consider that more people are now literate than ever before. Perhaps he should take a look inside a few graduate English programs in America, and tell me about the high standards upheld there.
Fuyu - Always Winter
Of course, this very article - with hardly a coherent paragraph, shows the trend clealy.
I do not have a problem with the language undergoing natural evolution. The issue is that some ways of speaking / writing gets allowed, which makes the language less consistent and full of things that mean the same. Being Norwegian, I have seen my language getting raped by youngsters who appearantly do not care that their sloppy use of the language gives their sentence two or three different interpretations. It is the old "Hang him not, wait until I come" vs. "Hang him, not wait until I come" (Ok, this thing does not sound that good in English, as it is a common Norwegian expamle.)
Dvorak on Doomtech
Maybe it's just me, but aside from a speling(sic!) error here and there I hardly ever find bigger errors (not to mention the LOL, ROTFL, etc. "monstrosities" he mentions) in comic books, and there's a lot of interesting stories that are more than just the pulp he thinks they are out there - and of course there's also a lot of printed dreck novels out there - Rosamunde Pilcher, anyone?
Can we please call it the "1337 chat generation" already?
KTHXBYE.
np: Luke Vibert - Acidisco (YosepH)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Time for some young-uns to update the Elements of Style... I'm at a loss to understand all this newfangled verbiage!
I worked in an office where one the the higher-ups capitalized the first letter of every line in his writing. Every generation has it's dummies. Personally I think the instant messenger talk is the new shorthand.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Slang will change as technology changes. Right now there is a significant amount of pressure on users to economize their use of language. What else do you expect when trying to 'type' on a phone's keypad? But that will change when, for example, phones have voice recognition. Then different pressures will emerge.
A-Bomb
Worst of all are Craigslist personals, most of which seem to come from room-temperature IQs.
For the love of God, read this book!
P.S. Learn to spell, while you are at it!
I could be said that more people are using the written word for communications now than ever before. And don't get too hung up on spelling. Before the dictionary words were a lot more fluid than they are even now. Even Shakespeare was found to spell his own name different ways... are we going to say he had trouble putting his thoughts down on paper in a coherant manner...
So, yes, my young friend, speak |_33t if you like to - but don't come and ask for a position, cause it'll be given to the one who can master both old and new world.
This has definitely not helped my speeling. If I type a word wrong in Word, it corrects it, and thus I get sloppy. Too bad slashdot does not have such a feature, but at least mis-spelled words do not get corrected to the wrong thing and lead to embracing situations.
i cnt c ur problem m8. :)
But seriously, kiddie slang is one thing, but when the degradation reaches the point at which the writer is no longer understandable, that's not language evolution as part of some natural process of change, that's just illiteracy, pure and simple.
Here's a small anecdote I sometimes relate when this subject comes up. When I'm not messing around on Slashdot, I often help out on some on-line programming forums, particularly those dedicated to helping less experienced people learn new skills. The quality of posts there vary from nicely written, polite, clear requests for help, to L337sp33k "can u do my homework 4 me kthx" drivel. Guess which posts the expert volunteers invest their time answering?
The really saddening thing, though, is when you see a post from someone who clearly is making a genuine effort, but simply isn't making sense because their language skills are so poor. Some of us try to help those people to clarify what they're asking and to form their questions more helpfully, but at the end of the day, their lack of literacy is directly disadvantaging them. If that's what they get on a board dedicated to helping them and run by volunteers who are willing to give up a certain amount of their time for that purpose, what are they going to get in the job market, for example?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The same criticism was leveled at baby boomers who were the first generation to grow up on television. And their grandparents were criticed for going to movies and listening to the radio.
If you go far enough back Plato quotes Socrates decrying the invention of writing because it could mean that people would commit less things to memory.
srsly dis b li3k a h00j prblm 4 r33l i dun n0 wai ppl cnt liek tak nrml li3k wut
If I ever... EVER talk like that again, please, somebody just shoot me.
Oh cruel fate, to be thusly boned! Ask not for whom the bone bones; it bones for thee. -Bender
Orwell wrote this same essay with more style and more grace in 1946. He also wrote it with a point in mind. It's called 'Politics and the English Language'. Google it and read it instead of this lame Wired article.
This essay is just a rant and that the coming generation is doomed, doomed, doomed! People have been saying that about the coming generation since ancient times. Ironically for someone who criticizes the emptiness of writing in the modern age, the author also says very little. Some writing by some people sucks. There are a lot of some people. Duh.
The author also ignores the enormous quantity of written material produced on a daily basis. Just because his friends and acquaintences are semi-literate doesn't mean the rest of us travel in the same circles of bad grammar and poor diction. It's really a sort of pompous thing to say from a position of authority that 'the world' can't write, read MY article it will tell you so. Sigh. Noob.
Shakespeare is just as understandable now as it was then.
/\/\0R3 L0\/3L'/ 4|\|D /\/\0R3 73/\/\P3R473: R0U9|-| \/\/1|\|D5 d0 5|-|4|10|\| d1/\/\/\/\'D; 4|\|D 3\/3R'/ Ph41R PhR0/\/\ Ph41R 50/\/\371/\/\3 d3(L1|\|35, B'/ (|-|4|\|(3 0R |\|47UR3'5 (|-|4|\|91|\|9 (0UR53 U|\|7R1/\/\/\/\'D; BU7 7|-|'/ 373R|\|4L 5U/\/\/\/\3R 5|-|4LL |\|07 Ph4D3 |\|0R L053 p05535510|\| 0Ph 7|-|@ Ph41R 7|-|0U 0\/\/357; |\|0R 5|-|4LL d347|-| bR49 7|-|0U \/\/4|\|D3R'57 1|\| |-|15 5|-|4D3, \/\/|-|3|\| 1|\| 373R|\|4L L1|\|35 70 71/\/\3 7|-|0U 9R0\/\/357: $0 L0|\|9 45 /\/\3|\| (4|\| bR347|-|3 0R 3'/35 (4|\| 533, $0 L0|\|9 L1\/35 7|-|15 4|\|D 7|-|15 91\/35 L1Ph3 70 7|-|33.
$|-|4LL 1 (0/\/\P4R3 7|-|33 70 4 5U/\/\/\/\3R'5 d4'/? 7|-|0U 4R7
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
How much we gain, how much we loose
I think we will start to see more of an impact on literacy from the employment market in the coming years. One of the biggest things I hear employers complain about is that young hires can barely write a coherent sentence, and consequently can't be relied upon to compose text for important presentations, reports, and so on. Assuming grammar checking software that magically turns shite into gold doesn't materialize in the very near future, we may well see an emphasis on writing skills trickle down from the knowledge-worker market to universities, colleges, and high schools. Let's hope so, anyway.
A-Bomb
I noticed a similar democratization between amateur radio and CB radio. It took some "stability" to get an amateur radio license because you actually had to study for an exam that was at one time only given at regional federal buildings. Not surprisingly, there was, generally, a certain intelligence and civility in communication. In contrast, any lunatic could send in for a CB license. And the results were predictable.
I would rather hope that the glass is half full. People who do not communicate well might learn something from online interaction.
And I try to remember that a lot of people do better with English than I do with Hindi.
I fucking hate the word "usage." Nobody uses it correctly, if there is a single correct use. Usually, the use "usage" when they mean "use."
What total losage.
I blame comic books. They contribute to a short attention span. Fucking comic books, with their pretty pictures and busty, half-clad superwomen. Mmmmm.... Superwoman. If Superwoman and Wonder Woman had a fight in, say, a tub of Jell-o, who do you think would lose her top first?
More people communicate today than have ever communicated before. The poor grammar they exhibit is probably a result of these amatuers being, well, amatuers. People 100 years ago mostly didn't write; those that did were generally better-educated.
I would say that literacy is on the rise, not the inverse.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Not to flame you or anything like that, but you should have used a semicolon instead of a comma after the word "grammar" in the fifth paragraph. ;-)
"What I need is an exact list of specific unknown problems we might encounter."
Um, comic book generation? Has this fellow just recieved "Seduction of the Innocent" via Pony Express? The average Generation Y kid has seldom seen a comic book, they don't show up on the news stand anymore. The average of the modern comic book reader is 34 and the level of the high end of the comic book market is considerably more literate than this fool. For example Warren Ellis'es issue of Planetary "Death Machine Telemetry" discusses the afterlife, nanotechnology, Richard Feynman, the Delphic oracle (and speculations on the biochemical nature of the fumes they inhaled) and the Kabbalah in one brilliant episode. Ellis probably used a shorter word count than this wanker used.
Of course he might mean manga, having been confused by the mysterious ways of the distant orient. Given that a huge percentage of the population read manga over in Japan, and use e-mail and texting, this must account for their horrific litteracy rates. Horrifically high that is.
is what I call it, and MTV is to be blamed.
I mean, have you read the crap snippets out of her recommended books?
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
First, I'm over 40 and (therefore) hopelessly out of touch. I have my own set of grammatic foibles (using of parentheses to offer alternate readings is one (recursive use of parentheses another)) that I ask readers to cope with. Ignore me if you like.
My big complaint with some writers who are growing up as part of the IM generation (we had zephyr-grams, and we liked 'em! - so there) is the use of styles that make text easier to write but harder to read. Things like lack of punctuation, no capitalization, numbers as abbreviations for words make writing quick, are handy when trying to write text on phone keypad, but slow down the reader.
On a more serious note, This is probably true the for the most part. However, i think that our ability to do other things has increased. For instance it is now pretty common to read stories with interspersed pictures or hyperlinks. These types of media immersion in our writing means that we are actually maintaining a higher level of content in most cases. Also i think that grammar nazi's like to be well nazi's about the topic. Most people can read even a truly awful sentence and still understand what was trying to be said. Furthermore, IM, SMS, or 1337 speak requires recognizing some serious bastardizations of the English language, ones you might have never run into before, as well as large numbers of acronyms. Honestly how many acronyms do you know? I feel like these are higher level skills in comparison to simply reading a sentence. The sentence might not be pretty by quotidian standards, but it probably requires more going on upstairs to read it. Finally the bit including our spelling is crap. We have spell checks, there are spell checks everywhere, in 97 you could effectively end an argument with some one by pointing out their poor spelling. This sort of ad hominem is no longer tolerated because at the worst some one can scream "stupid spell check," and we all nod in agreement, because it has happened to you.
I start out with a statement: "Chat speak" is not permitted in any form and is defined it as using punctuation symbols or shorthand as cognates for words and concepts that are normally expressed with letters. To wit, Using "@" for "at" or "2" for "to" or "too" or "U" for "you" is not permitted and not limited to those examples. Abbreviations are permitted as long as an abbreviation appears in Webster's New World College Dictionary and conforms either to the Chicago or APA styles. Any usage of "chat speak" in any communication to me in query to this class or through the normal course of instruction, test answer for grade or essay submitted for grade will result in my ignoring the communication and automatically marking the answer as incorrect or marking the grade down on the essay.
;) thx" bullshit in its tracks.
Stops that "Hey prof U are keepin me outta grad skool can i meet U @ yr office 2 talk?
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
... that he deliberately conflates business jargon with tech jargon. The latter is for saying as much as possible with as few words as possible. The former is for saying as little as possible with as many words as possible. They are not equivalent.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
He's completely right. Trying to read these posts, although ledgible, sucked the entire point of the posts away. People just blabber about with page long replies, which you can't help but become disinterested.
We all use slang, we all use abbreviations, jargon and impolite ways of speaking, especially with friends and family. The problem i run into is more and more people who cant "Turn it off" when they need to. People who use the same bad grammar when writing an office e-mail that they do when chatting with buddies online or at happy hour. Kids who cant write a coherent written sentence because they are so used to using slang. Its nothing that different from what I say when talking to friends, or get into a flamewar, but i DONT use it in the office, or when meeting someone for the first time, or when applying for a job. Thats the problem.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
The author blames many of the problems on instant or near-instant communications stating that the slang developed is essentially eroding our ability to formulate coherent thoughts in writing when called upon to do so.
What does that mean? Youngsters don't have coherent thoughts? Or, they're able to formulate incoherent thoughts, but not their thoughts that are coherent?
You probably meant "to formulate thoughts in writing coherently" or even "in coherent writing". And "essentially eroding"? As opposed to eroding (our ability etc.) in a non-essential, unimportant way? Or did you mean "in essence, the claim is that.."? It's also curious how the young folk, apparently, are quite capable of writing well when they're not called upon to do so. They can do it if they want, but not when it's asked of them? Sounds like they're faking it. But what do you expect in a world where "slang" (vocabulary) "erodes" our abilities! In the topsy-turvy word where an abstraction like "non-standard vocabulary" can "erode", well, another abstraction, anything is possible! It almost makes up for the fact that "instant or near-instant communications" have been around since Adam and Eve, so their presence is not really a variable. (Probably you meant electronic, written, instant communication.)
Lay off the AIM for a bit; you'll find you don't feel as much need to sound pompous in other media.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Yes, I read the article, but I know for me I want more facts and less editorials, more proof and less speculation, more initiative and less "we'll print it if it's plausible", more rationality and less sensationalism. I don't know what this person is smoking because I definitely don't just lap up anything in facts-as-entertainment form.
Is this really how the current generation is? Am I out of touch already? I sure hope not. I mean here we are participating in discussions about these issues and setting up public forums such as slashdot with which to express ourselves on important issues. I didn't get much justification by the article's author on his position. Can anyone else comment? Not just a "sampling the hype" type of opinion but one based in reality from what you can tell from your peers?
Twinstiq, game news
What, the use of AIM and MSN etc is causing a decline in spelling skills! Unpossible!
Seriously, this is a big issue. My little sister is 14 and whenever I see her on the computer she's typing away to her friends in another language. It's more than just the old cliché "lol"s and "omfg"s, it's also a large influence from 'ghetto' speak or whatever you want to call that particular variety of pidgin English. All her friends do the same and it's so difficult to decipher it. Contractions are the order of the day, even contractions of contractions, so "uk babe" means "are you okay, my dear?" - that one's quite ambiguous to a non-savvy reader. Also, these other words creep in from spoken language; eg, in Nottingham it seems to be 'cool' for these kids to refer to members of the female gender as "gyals" - your guess is as good as mine as to how this one's pronounced, but they all know what it means.
The fact is (and I'm speaking as an English undergraduate) that written and spoken language are (obviously) two very different beasts, but the rise of technology and the communications advances it brings have blurred the lines. What method of communication is IM - spoken or written? Logic would say written, but virtually nobody (below the age of 20, anyway) types as they would write in, say, a letter. Instant Messaging and other forms of online communication (email, forums, etc) aren't one or the other, but they do tend to show closer links with spoken language, which is having a detrimental effect on written language since the twain should never meet, historically. We know it's becoming an issue when kids are handing in exam papers written in 'net shorthand, and if there aren't better controls established either in schools to make sure kids can see the differences, or online to try to limit the level of intellect-crushing abrvtns, the future generations are gonna be really limited.
It is ironic that this story is on Slashdot, where the editors can't even be bothered to learn how to hyphenate correctly. And even worse, they can't be bothered to fix grammar and spelling after 90 people point it out.
All the testing in public schools is part of the problem. Students and teachers both are judged by the test results, with harsh penalties for both in the case of failure.
The result is that teachers are now teaching toward the tests rather than toward the knowledge. Sure, most kids will pass that test, now, but what have they really learned? How much have the really learned?
~UP
Eat the Path.
this thought is nothing new: morals, the language, etc.: it's all going to pot, the end of the world is nigh, etc.
bullshit
what is going on is that some people are almost autistic in their attachment to certain signifiers of what "good language" is or what "moral behavior" is
human beings need morality, and they need to communicate. these needs are nver going away, nor are our ability to satisfy those needs ever going away
it is just that, from one century to the next, what signifies these things changes
but so you have some people becoming hysterical ninnies because what signifies these things to them changes, and they can't deal with it
they're just brittle people
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Back in the day, when all we had to communicate was letters and maybe the odd telegram, people put some thought into their words.
These days, on the other hand, thanks to technology and the internet and whatnot, anybody can just walk up to anybody and start a conversation willy-nilly! No wonder the amount of instant communication is hurting communcative skills in children!
George Orwell was concerned with individuals being able to write concise, well descript thoughts. One of his other predominate book, 1984, introduced a shortened version of the English language, Newspeak. The problem with Newspeak was it removed culture from the language, and thereby removed the ability of the individual to express their thoughts in a coherent structure. It detached idioms and truncated the ability of the individual to communicate the way they felt. In essence, it robbed the entity of their individuality.
(or as commonly communicated today)
Orwell wanted people to write cleanly. his book 84 showed us newspeak, a simple, efficient language. it simplified how we related by removing culture from our language. it removed the ability of the individual to express themselves in many situations.
As for illiteracy... I believe that Alexander Dumas (fils or pere, I'm uncertain) said, "There have always been the literate and the illiterate -- the difference today is that the illiterate can read." As we move forward from a text-based world of information to a multi-media world, the illiterate will return to a communication based on sensations rather than abstracted thought.
Pity. Imagine a planet full of thinking, reasoning, literate people.
Good. More jobs for me, and with a little work, my kids. (Ok, it's a lot of work, including reading to my kids 30-45 minutes a day, and the older one (6) is transitioning to reading to us. But I digress.)
Seriously, not everyone can be a rocket scientist. Some folks have to take less mentally-strenuous jobs, and the upside to that is that it takes less education and effort to get a job that focuses on rote process or repetitive simple problem-solving. Of course, there's the whole unfairness issue relating to people who work in jobs that are physically or emotionally draining for shit pay, but that's not the issue here. It used to be that motivated people could rise to hit the maximum vocation that their formal or self education allowed. Now it seems that educated people sink to the vocational level that their self motivation and application of that education allows. Same effect, no?
My brother, for example, is an overeducated undermotivated weenie who's dumbed himself down with IM-speak, and wonders why he's not an appealing job candidate. But that brings up an interesting issue: I don't think that the deterioration of language skills can be examined in a vacuum. What about the deterioration of social skills that seems to accompany the IM-speak txting crap? IM/TXT communciations involve effects from reduced level of effort, lack of persistence, reduced affect, and perceived levels of anonymity.
All I have is anecdotal evidence, but the idea of sending thank-you letters, participating in professional societies, and writing articles for review by your peers seems totally alien to that crowd. And I don't mean to be stuck-up about that. An article for your peers might be a well-written blog entry or a political rant in email, not necessarily an academic paper. >>>> My point is that if you notice that people are sharing soundbites instead of whole ideas, then it makes sense to take a look at the mode of sharing, not just the sound-bite vs whole-idea issue.
Jon
I think not...(*poof*)
...and getting your freak on, well then you don't need too many words.
I feel the problem is what youth are talking ABOUT, not how they're talking.
Only 1 in 10 under 20yo voted in the last election.
The youth (in America anyway) don't seem to care about anything past their immediate sensory input.
Do not think of English as a programming language. Programming langauges, on the whole, are internally consistent. English isn't and it's something of a bastard language.
English steals from Latin, Greek, French, German, Arabic, Spanish and dozens of other languages. Imagine a programming language that is really just a mix of every other programming language available and you would have a close approximation of English.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
come on, "not to mention all those irritating acronyms: LOL, WYSIWYG, IMHO, etc.)" IMHO this is a direct attack on slashdot community
DON'T PANIC
Old folks always have to complain about something. This guy has a stick up his ass about grammar. He probably yells about people driving too fast while he's doing 50 in a 65 mph zone. He needs to take a couple more back pills and calm down.
"Ant writes to tell us..." Sure he didn't just near-instantly communicate to tell us?
They also make for a worse overall reading experience. I'm only 23 (and therefore not *quite* out of touch) but I can't stand overuse of abbreviations and rubbish punctuation. On a mobile phone it can be excused but when writing a letter, or even a /. posting, more effort should be put into creating something both readable and articulate. Of course, a few minor spelling/grammer/punctuation mistakes *should* be tolerated :P
Silly rabbit
sur as a coledge studnet i frimly believe tht internet comunications cn only hlp in enceraging proper english...
And the fact that it took me a really long time to write that sentence only helps my case.
The most glaring examples of bad grammar come from people that would be illiterate whether or not they could be heard on the internet. Most of the article is just "blah blah blah, I'm old!"
These are the bastards that made me write essays with a pencil back in the day-- the kind of people that think typing is too impersonal (issuing a big "fuck you" from people with lifelong fine motor skill impairments, like myself). There are some bits I agree with, though. I don't like these bullshit buzzwords one bit. They're obfuscating the language, and they don't make any logical *sense* in most sentences. They're frivolous and have no literary merit. On the other hand, they allow me to tell the difference between a lunatic illiterate slob and an eloquent speaker.
I'd like to point something out to this guy: language is meant to evolve. I hate when people write ambiguous, redundant, and meaningless sentences, but if I can clearly understand what a sentence is saying without too much analysis, I'm OK with it. Some of these ivory-tower "writers" think that language should be static, or rather partially static. They'd like to be the sole ones to wield the tools that bend and extend language. '2 bad 4 them' that they aren't the only modifiers. People must either change or be changed. Sorry!
"essentially eroding our ability to formulate coherent thoughts in writing when called upon to do so." they are only incoherent to those unfamilar with the slang. People in the know can understand what the writer is expressing, and as more of those exist and as they age, the level of understanding will only increase (until replaced by more degenerate slang.) This is just other instance of the standard being replaced griping about it.
comic book generation? was this written in 1950? what kid reads comic books today? and, incidentally, my memory is that comic books have fairly good grammar and spelling, with the exceptions of your 'pow's and 'biff's.
go get it
One thing that has always amused me is when I receive text messages from people who own phones with full QWERTY keyboards or T9 capability, and I'm still forced to deal with "u wana go 2 da cocrt". You've been handed a solution to having to hammer each key 3 times to get the letter you wanted - use it! I tolerated AOL-speak from people in years past when it really was a pain to type full words, much less use capitalization and punctuation.
Using AOL-speak on a desktop or laptop computer is only acceptable if you have some disability that limits your mobility, and makes hitting each key a struggle.
The worst part of all this is that many, many people are fully aware of how stupid they come across when they lower their standards of communication. Willfully ignorant behavior is the worst kind. The trend towards anti-intellectualism in today's society is sickening.
It isn't. And I am flummoxed by neither MySpace nor AIM. The amount of data transmitted by internet shorthand gets smaller and smaller as the shorthanding gets more profound.
+++ATH0
One of the main reasons for designing, building, and programming hundreds of millions of cheap, powerful computers is that they can be used to transform an individual's spelling and grammar into the universal standard and vice-versa.
if i dont spell no good or talk no good it dont make no diffrens if i got a gigahertz pc that can fix my spellin and grammer.
The reason that we don't have spelling and grammar checkers built into the OS is because it is assumed that anyone who can afford a computer has already passed a level of advanced education and literacy. However that isn't true since computers are now so cheap and widespread that they are used regardless of level of academic compentency.
And, don't forget, everyone is rather dim outside of their native language.
So it's our responsibility to make sure that the applications and operating systems that we create have high quality spelling and grammar checkers available and running.
By the way, where's the spelling checker on this Slashdot comment box?
I think you're ignoring the reasoning behind this. It's one thing for language to evolve because the participants find new ways to communicate which are more comfortable, done to be different, because of a lack of exposure to the standard language and rules of grammar, etc.
It's quite another when there's a distinct resentment of rules and education, and the idea that education is distinctly conformist and therefore a mark of evil.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Omega 3 deficiency you fools (like silicon for the brain).
Food has less these days (beef and eggs used to have way more and way less omega 6 which competes for uptake somehow - they still do if they're raised naturally without finishing on grain - our paleolithic ancestors also ate way more roots than grains). Brains don't have the raw material they need to rewire themselves (this and the sugar/caffeine are why most software's so lame - if I ever start a tech company [overseas of course] there'll be mandatory diet standards with blood tests [plus free food and supplements and all the other benefits of working for superhumanity])
Try feeding kids or yourself good unrancid fish oil for 3 months (Carlson's tastes good) and then see what happens. Modern humanity seems to be slowly starving and speciating into nonsentient cattle, while sapiency can only survive by becoming more than human (doubting ALL memes and choosing decisions and trust priorities based on experience-developed intuition [one's sense of the laws of physics which lets one fill in missing variables in state+change=state] - this's evolution's adaptation to the schizophrenic dead society which turns non-adapted minds into autistic, schizo, or junkie wastelands [note that most modern grains and all dairy contain morphine analogs {and I count sugar as smack also}]).
Just look at the developing body types (big fat ass and belly VS my thin diamond-cut paleo hunter physique which I'm sure others have figured out how to achieve as well (loads of supplements plus naltrexone to cure genetic autism [too many nutrient using or peptide non-digesting adaptations from different ethnic groups I think] plus eating whatever natural paleo food I wish with digestion efficiency over time and gut length carefully managed [I can eat a whole small intestine full of nuts plus lipase and it just makes me wired after it digests - one can just cycle carbs so excess convert to glycogen, not fat]).
I suggest you join up however you can before the flu kills all the inferior fools at once (leaving only mutants and those smart enough to learn from them). Also please add a 'maybe not real' to everything me or anyone else ever has or will say (including your memory or 'facts' from school or the elders on TV) - otherwise you get infected with schizo memes and go crazy.
And I don't blame him. He's a college professor, and college students should act and communicate like educated people. By letting such habits slide, he would not promoting a full education; he'd be allowing students to fall flat in other areas. Written communication is essential in the workplace, and graduates who get jobs and continue to communicate in "chat speak" should be shunned. "Chat speak" in normal communication is more of a Jr. High and High School behavior (i.e. juvenile). While it's appropriate in its proper arena, it doesn't belong in a university classroom.
Google's QOTD happens to be related to the topic at hand:
There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.-Asimov
I recently taught a course to help undergraduate students to write English properly. I made them all create blogs and told them to write a short review of a game every week. Most weeks I conducted a "critique" session on Friday, where I went through every review and gave pointers on style, grammar and punctuation (mostly the latter two). I think the most interesting thing that I learned was that most students don't think of these things as important at all. So for a long time, some of them had significant problems understanding the difference between writing properly and not writing properly. Often they would write just as they speak, and it took a while for them to understand that this looks wrong. Many of my students had an extremely hard time finding errors in their own writing, no matter how many times they re-read it. When I asked students to edit other students' work, they tended to lack the confidence in their own ability to do this. The technique that most of them found most helpful was to concentrate hard on the structure of paragraphs and to build up paragraphs sentence by sentence in a very formulaic way.
I think that over the course of the module, most students did improve somewhat and they said that they enjoyed it. However, I have doubts about how much of what they learned will stick during the rest of their studies. I feel that it will be pretty hard for them to undo fifteen years of neglect of their English writing skills.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
Also, computer grammar checkers are shit.
By the way, where's the spelling checker on this Slashdot comment box?
On mine it's right-click and choose the bottom option. Opera v8.51 Linux.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
The proper, educated, Victorian type wanders into a so-called ghetto one day by mistake, hears the kids speak, can't understand anything that was said. The type leaves the so-called ghetto confused and alarmed.
What's the mental chain reaction that follows from here? Initial insecurity ("Why couldn't I understand those black kids talk? Aren't I educated enough?") followed by early rationalization? ("They probably can't understand each other either. Maybe black kids are stupid?"), fear that they might be racists ("Oh my god, am I a racist for thinking they're stupid?!") and finally revised rationalization ("No, of course not, they're not stupid because they're black. They're just poor and undereducated, not like me who is very educated. It's a good thing I'm not a racist anymore. Now, if only they could learn speak properly, they might get out of their mess...")
And so begins another social agenda.
Except here, replace negrophobia with netphobia.
(If the word "negrophobia" has a social movement attached to it, I'm not alluding to it. I just pulled the word out of my ass.)
Me scored 91%; guess that means I R not a retard after-all.
Power to the Peaceful
The author has a pretty irritating style overall, but he really set my off with this quote:
"No student should be allowed to bring a calculator into a math class. Ever."
Yeah, cause when I was learning to do Fourier transforms in college, I really robbed myself by not doing the arithmatic bits by hand. I can see that you shouldn't use a basic calculator while learning arithmatic (and similarly, you shouldn't use the integration features of you calculator when learning integration) but they already spend an absurdly long time teaching arithmatic anyway. Ooohhh, you need to carry the 2! Class, lets spend several weeks mastering this increadibly difficult concept that a retarded monkey could master in 15 minutes!
Bah, he just really hit a nerve with me there. I got turned off to math in the fourth grade (where you spend the entire year learning the oh so complex mysteries of multiplication) and wasted my prime learning years as a kid thinking math was boring, stupid busywork with limited usefulness. Then as an adult I had to struggle trying to catchup in college where useful, interesting math was finally taught at a fast pace.
I can't count the number of times I've been critized for spelling by people who deserve twice the critizisim for not independently thinking. So which skill do you think will be more needed in the information age?
This isn't like the old days, when you had to type out a page with perfection on a manual typerwriter - and to redo it ment you had to thow the whole thing out and start from scratch. Frankly, obsessing to that level now is a waste of time. It also isn't like the old days when managers had secrataries to do that for them, and where a memo was a once per day thing to higher managment.
Really, if it's that important. I'll pass it thru a spell checker and a gramer checker. But this is everyday communication, and it is imperfect, people are imperfect, that is the way the human condition is. If only people obsessed about being true to their nature only a fraction as much as they do trying to look perfect to the outside world. We would actually be more perfect instead of looking more perfect.
Isn't the problem that you are sending real time messages and don't have hours and days to proof read things? How long does it take to write a term paper and make sure it is good? Compare that to how long it takes to write an IM message and send that. Sure, you could turn in your term paper after the first draft, or spend a week reviewing your IM message, but they are different animals.
The United Statis is declining because we don't reward the people who are smart. Some ape who can put a rubber ball through a round hoop is a highly paid hero, while someone who IS literate, scientific, etc... is lucky if their jobs aren't outsourced over seas. Before you start getting down on kids maybe you should look at the message that society sends.
Oh, and this also answers the age old question of why people die. If they didn't there would never be any change. The old crowd would stick to their old ways and prevent any progress because it is a perversion. Look at the muslims. They used to be highly advanced, but now it's more important to observe the old ways.
I guess the more things change the more they do stay the same.
I do not care if you are using e-mail, IM or SMS, use that period and use that apostrophe. Use appropriate and proper punctuation, capitalization, spelling and grammar, else I'm simply not talking to you.
Have you heard of a comma splice?
Language is defined by how it is used, not by how conservative old farts think it should be.
The need and basic requirements for communication ensures that language conforms to a minimum standard. Aesthetic criteria are added by old farts after the fact.
That said, business jargon is so much noise, but to anyone who has ever heard of Dilbert, this is hardly breaking news...
One can speculate about the clarity of ideas (or the lack thereof) of somebody unable to tell when to use "its" and when to use "it's" - of which there are many in this forum.
I have several times wondered if the loss of 'putting together coherent thoughts" capability came before the loss of 'good grammar and spelling'.
I have heard from many people that they read documents from people that have perfect spelling and grammar but make no sense. they don't even have the stupid stuff that would indicate that the writer of the document was letting spell and grammar check do all the work.
eric
I say O Rly? No Wai!
I agree, Jane. If a Slashdot post, Usenet posting, or distribution list is so poorly written that it pains me, I just ignore it. If someone doesn't respect me enough to take the most basic care, I don't feel the need to read their thoughts. Their thoughts are invariably as sloppy as their mechanics.
Now, I'm not a pedant - I'm talking about posts that don't use any capital letters- very rarely use punctuation, and string half-baked thoughts together like popcorn on a Christmas tree. I'm not talking about people who make mistakes -that's all of us. I'm talking about people who don't care that they make 20 mistakes in a single post/email.
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
I've seen this happening for years. I only realised the irony of it all when I studied English Language for a year. For centuries technology has been used to preserve the English language, and now that the tables are turned, language is playing catch-up with it's own evolution.
The only thing that really concerns me is that people don't seem to type things that they would say out loud. That is, they make perfect sense when speaking, but not whilst typing, as though different parts of their brain are dealing with language for each.
Do you see what I did there?
Ink has been around for a lot longer than graphite-based scribing. And it quickly became a specialized function. Students were not expected to make their own ink.
... we can go back 2,000+ years and find papyrus/paper merchants.
As for harvesting their own bark
And who used quills in 1941? You're talking WORLD WAR II at that time. You know "atomic bomb" or "jet aircraft" or "radio"?
They kept telling me, you need to read more you need to write more. Now that kids are doing what we've told them (to read and write), because they're doing it on their own terms (with instant messanging, email, text messages, blogs, etc), this guy is trying to say it's bad thing because he wants to be a grammar nazi. Ok, whatever. Oh by the way, the "comic book generation" is a little bit out dated. I mean come on, comic books have been popoular since the 50's and even earlier. I think it would be better to call this generation "the instant messanger generation", but hey I'm a member of this illiterate group of idiots, so what do I know?
No Sigs!
ROFLCOPTER OMGZoR2 IM SO FUNY
Language is the protocol by which we communicate, to stay in the computer term. We have a set of symbols, a way of putting them together, with the intent to make the other end understand what this end wanted to say.
:)
If the other end understands things like bbl, lol, rolfmao and ianal, then it is unneccessary to communicate more than those acronyms to get the point across. Think loss-less compression.
It changes where words are used to create art. I don't think a novel would be considered great when it used the same words over and over, not using the "right" words to get the mood across. But that's an entirely different matter.
In the fast paced world of online communication, you don't ponder over the absolutely correct phrase. You just try to get your point across, and yes, this includes the danger of misinterpretation. But that's the price you pay to be heard at all.
Imagine I gave myself another hour or so to brood over the text. Do you think it would get read? It would be drowned in the flood that washed over the thread in the meantime.
Whoops, already happened.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I've been working to get Blissymbolics a topic of discussion for about a year now. Blissymbolics was invented by Charles K. Bliss about fifty years ago for the purposes of being a universal auxiliary writing system. As such, there is no phonetics -- it is solely symbolic (or more technically, indexical). The idea behind this is that it doesn't matter what your native language is, you can still learn and communicate through Blissymbolics. Essentially, it is a workaround for the language barrier between the world's languages.
s tm), I decided to write the Directorate General for Translation at the EU. So far, there has not been much of a response. Charles Bliss faced a similar problem where he wrote tens of thousands of letters to officials in various governments, pleading the case for a simple, yet powerful solution that is Blissymbolics, but he was met mostly by silence.
It is also remarkeably easy to learn. The current user population is people with cerebral palsy, who are able to use symbol boards to communicate, and also some people who are mentally handicapped and would ordinarily be illiterate.
After reading a BBC article on the combinatoric explosion of translations facing the EU (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3499393.
I guess a Blissymbolics revolution would nescessarily need to start at a grassroots level. There's some work being done on a browser that can automatically display pages in various languages in various symbol systems, including, I think, Blissymbolics. But the number one principle of marketing is need recognition, which is complicated in the case of Blissymbolics because it seems like you have to believe in it in order to see how it would fill the very broad and vague need for universal communication. A Blissymbolic browser might be great for tapping the linguisitc diversity of the internet, but you'd have to find it worthwhile to learn Blissymbolics in the first place.
I learned to read when I was three. Over the last twenty years, my brain has gradually optimised the paths used to recognise words and parse phrases and sentences until the point where I can do it very quickly. If you write in a way that is ambiguous, then I have to pause and try both ways of interpreting your sentence. If you spell things incorrectly, then I will have to backtrack and re-parse. If you use 'you're' instead of 'your' (for example) then I will get to the end of your sentence, realise it doesn't make sense, and spend a second re-parsing it. Over the length of an article, then a number of mistakes like this may waste a minute or two of my time[1]. Now, imagine you have 100,000 readers. You have just wasted 100,000 person-minutes. That works out at just under seventy person-days. If you are willing to waste that much time out of laziness then you are no better than a spammer.
[1] Actually, it won't. I will simply decide that if your ideas are not important enough to express well, then they are not important enough for me to read, and move on.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I disagree -- the technology is not leading to an inability to communicate. Technology is making it possible to circulate written items far more widely and easily than before. This merely exposes a reality long hidden: the vast majority of people have never been able to communicate in the written form.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
Modern comics are written by professional writers and contain far more complex vocabulary than he's crediting them. The only exceptions would be special characters like "Bizarro" that speak improper grammar because it's a trait of the character. Even the japanese manga imported has proper grammar if it's translated correctly.
From the article: "But when change does violence to the accepted standards of the king's English and takes the mother tongue into the realm of the unfathomable, as does almost all jargon coming out of the technology and business worlds, it's our job as keepers of the grail to drive it back into the dark little hole from whence it came." - What's the difference between this and indecipherable jargon?
i can see i communicated an idea across to you, as you encapsulated it in your response
of course, you won't ever admit that
you're to busy getting off on the vile evil i've committed of not capitalizing
whatever, yawn
the point is to communicate
everything else, EVERYTHING ELSE, is superfluous
if you can understand the idea i was trying to communicate, the language did it's job
everything else, ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING ELSE, is superfluous, wasteful, unnecessary semantic structure
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Language is such an important part of any nation's culture, it really is depressing to see it treated with so little interest or value. Writing is a skill we should all value highly; and, yes, that also means paying due attention to spelling and grammar.
There are certain writing mistakes that seem to crop up repeatedly on the internet. They are beginning to bother me because the overall attitude seems to be one of nonchalance from the writers of these errors and even other readers.
Some examples I've noticed:
- An inability to distinguish between 'your' and 'you're'
- Similar confusion with 'their', 'there' and 'they're'
- Frequent misspelling of 'lose' as 'loose'
- Confusing 'effect' with 'affect' (and vice versa)
- Using the phrase "I could care less" when the writer actually means "I couldn't care less" (although this is so frequent in the US, it seems to have become acceptable form)
- Also using 'of' instead of 'have' ("it could of happened")
- Missing out 'of' completely as in "a couple weeks ago" (this seems to be a difference between UK and US English)
Should we be tolerant of these mistakes given that most of these errors are committed by native English speakers? Why do we bother lamenting a supposed decline in our educational standards when in the real world we adopt an indifferent attitude to such mistakes anyway?
You have a good point. But I think an important qualitative difference between then and now is that in previous eras -- say, between about 1700 and 1950 in Western Europe and North America -- the Donnes and Popes, though a small minority, were the ones setting the standards for literature and for discourse in general. Certainly, most people did not write as well as they did. But there was at least a general recognition that their writing was something for the average literate person to emulate, or at least admire. And so if you compare, say, modern e-mails or blogs with letters from Civil War soldiers to their families, it's hard not to feel that earlier generations just had more skill with writing.
This has changed since the introduction of television in the 1950s, which has presented an unprecedented challenge to writing and print as the primary means by which people acquire information and has, according Neil Postman's excellent (and prescient) Amusing Ourselves to Death, even caused fundamental changes in the way we think. There may still be Donnes and Popes, but most people are too busy watching Lost to read them or even know about them. Printed words no longer drive our culture and give ordinary people the tools with which to express ourselves. Images and soundbites do.
The Internet began as a primarily print-like medium, and perhaps its evolution would have been much different if it had been introduced in 1800. But by the time it went mainstream, the effects of two or three generations of television on the modern mind had already occurred. Compare the typical web page of today, crowded with animations and banner ads, with one in 1995, and it's easy to see that the Internet is becoming more TV-like with time. If the Federalist Papers were published on-line today, how many hits would they realistically get?
As far as I checked, 'teh' literacy and 'grammer' have n3v3r b33n b3tt3r. :)
I blame l33t-sp34k for the decline.
poisadvhopuiaerg ';ash ;ohpoaer978 ;lw4h; ;ahwe ashkvc7s ghw4e7vnmj tfe7abnkjd. hnjakw4e ghaewr gyxc, blwke asguie ciug blhaweryo vbzsh avbjyfae. a;jkwe asued ias irblhaiud kljad ghakerh!!!
aernjkl;v hgwerhu cstgfui webker?
I must say, just skimming over some of the top-level comments, that I've never seen such attention to writing quality in Slashdot posters. Apparently this community, at least, does have the "ability to formulate coherent thoughts in writing when called upon to do so." Or maybe the moderators are being especially anal for this topic. :)
Our literacy is eroding? WTF? OMG! ROFL!
BRB
I often find those complaining about degredation of language are those of that generation which have to be shown how to open a word document.
Now while this isn't universal, I'd like to say this to the older generation. Face it old timers, where did all your learning times tables by rote and perfect spelling get you? It got you a set of redundant skills in a world of spell checkers, hand held calculators and 17 year olds who you have to ask nicely if you want that file you corrupted fixed.
The world moved on, we expect kids these days to have an insanely wide base of skills. So we diversified our curriculum, making qualifications easier but broader. And then wondered why it was we got a generation that couldn't spell or add.
The real travesty of the situation isn't that the younger generation cant spell or add. They have no need of these skills. The real travesty is that we dropped things like calculus from secondary education, matricies from high school, poetic techniques have been dumbed down to the point that we tell kids what an Alliteration is, and how to tell if words rhyme. All so we could keep a little bit of spelling, times tables and addition in the curriculum.
It is time to acknowledge that modern man does not need these outdated skills, and has found a better way. Drop them, and in thier place have children doing the hard stuff again.
Yes language is changing, but I feel at this point it's changing VERY rapidly due to IM. I think in chat people are trying to emulate and in some cases exceed verbal communication through the use of emoticons and 13375p33k, etc... I would guess that we are modelling what we type closer to how we speak and think. Language is being innovated upon through the use of technology but there will always be those who aspire to a more artful use of language. A new set of technologically specific colloquialisms are being developed but as opposed to be regional they are perhaps relative to class and technological savvy.
In other words, it's not that language is degrading per se, it's that it is developing in ways scholars do not fully comprehend.
I think people want to use technology to communicate as rapidly as possible. Surprisingly a number of linguistic innovations and shortcuts are being adopted by people who seem to chatter like eighth-grade schoolgirls. This doesn't, however, invalidate the usefulness of said innovations.
-e
Sure, language changes. One of the best ways to see what's happening is to see what the old fuddy-duddies are grumbling about what the kids are doing to the language this time. There are writings from Roman times on this subject. It's nothing new.
The biggest grammatical change in the English language in the last 100 years is probably the loss of the subjunctive mood. We still express the idea, but we say it differently. Dig up a tape of somebody really old (say, The Queen Mum in her latter years) and listen to how the language has changed.
The latest has been the loss of distinction between adjectives and adverbs, particularly in spoken English. Very few people distinguish between "good" (adjective) and "well" (adverb) anymore. I've noticed this one in my own lifetime. Does this affect the ability to communicate? Or is context enough, without those silly -ly endings?
When I hear the younger generation (teens, twenties) talk I hear an excessive reliance on fill words ("kind of", "sort of", "um", etc.) and lots of use of excessively general terms ("that thing", etc.). I'm open enough to not grumble (much :-) about the
bastardization of the language; maybe it is
just different. I still wonder if I'm missing nuances, or if the level of communication
really is at a low level.
The less said about spelling and grammar (especially the online version) the better.
...laura, once a member of the younger generation. Now, at 44, a member of the older generation.
As much as the author comes off at points as a real pompous jerk of an academician, he has some good points in there, and overall, we can blah-blah about this issue in defense of musty intellectualism or in defense of reprehensible grammar, but the decay of the language is real, and is a problem. Either way, it's reassuring to know that when society collapses, my competitors for what will remain of our precious and scant resources will be primarily overweight, with poor mastery of the written word.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
Sorry about the pun :o)
>I'm left wondering how the generation of today manage to communicate with each other
The absence of punctuation, poor spelling and bad grammar don't mean that people cannot communicate. It doesn't even mean they miss-interpret meaning. What it does do is demand the reader establish the context from which the meaning can be established.
But thats a dangerous path, since one cannot always expect to be able to generate a sufficient context.
I'm all for improving these skills rather than allowing them to slide. My own skills are poor but I'm working on improving them. And with books like "Eats Shoots & Leaves" around, I'm actually having quite a bit of fun doing it.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
I am sure that all have read this poem on the subject, or complained of the misuse of homonyms (they're / there / their) or apostrophes (it's / its), but it goes further than that. An example of a common misuse is "loose" for "lose", or "then" for "than".
My problem with it is that it slows my reading speed down and ofttimes, my comprehension as well. I have to reread and think "the what the hell do they mean there?" I'd prefer that people simply misspelled things to using the wrong "right" word.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
A thread where spelling and grammar nazis won't be modded off-topic! Yes!
Telltale Games: Bone, Sam and Max
There was one langauge, once, if you read the bible and the story of the tower of babel. God confounded us, and we decided to use different terms and meanings for different words.
The one langauge evolved into dialects since people have their likes and dislikes. Cultural differences between people, choices really, eventually became a lot of similar choices; some people preffered more emotional meanings, some people preffered more logical meanings, some people preffered more precise meanings and still others preffered less precise meanings. And some people felt one sound was more meaningful than another sound. Those dialects evolved to the point that the cultures that used them, due to misunderstandings, formed a mutual dislike for eachother and seperated; see the USA and Brittan. The Brittish say we speak "American" and we say the Brittish speak "Brittish". A pretty profound difference if you ask me.
And as it evolves, people fail tests because they simply have no use for certain words.
What we have here is an acceleration of the use of technology to modify langauge into something more precise of what the person means. If what they mean isn't precise in their mind, of course their use of langauge will not be precise and by extension, their use of technology. Generally speaking, the more intelligent or in-resonance the 2 communictors are, the less meaning must be conveyed to get the meaning across. See an old married couple talk about their day; they can almost predict what's going on as if they're one entity. Telepathy has always existed between resonant individuals, it's just that they never realize it.
What it comes down to is that this guy is angry because he believes the mainstream is mainstream, and he's choosing to believe one heck of a lie; There is no such thing as "mainstream media". His worldview is that of one believing everyone believes everything they read; that the average human being believes everything they see; that there's a mainstream media, and that media has psyops-level control over the population.
The truth is that not everyone believes what they are told; infact very few people believe what they are told in a 10 second soundbyte; they turn against it just as quickly for another one, and another, until that viewpoint is challenged and shown to be extremly weak by a more powerful viewpoint which they stick to. Most people are more likely to believe what they see in a TV series, especially if they're introversive to begin with and include the TV characters in their life. Truth is unconquerable because it empowers those with it with something non-truth cannot provide; gods providence. If you believe eating shit is nutritional even though we can proove that false, you can believe it to the death, and that's exactly where it'll lead you. Believing in a lie leads one to destroy themself because it spreads like a plague in the mind. To stand by one lie until death means you must change every beliefe you have for it when the challenge occures. The truth conquers one in a similar fashon, but instead of killing you, it makes you unconquerable, and if you stand to it until the death, more likely than naught, it'll lead you away from it.
The world is seething full of life more than ever, and journalism, his form of journalism, has shifted from reporting to people what's important to reporting to them what someone wants reported to them. It's a bigoted game, and one fewer and fewer people are falling for. Journalism and newspapers were never meant for a national level; it was always meant for a local, township level. Which is why the mainstream media is a lie and why those behind it propegate the lie to the point it fulfills itself; they want you to believe everyone thinks and believes what they say even though that is demonstratably false, so you do not realize alternatives exist and that you are in power of your life.
And that's why it's called a godbox; weither it's a computer, a radio, a TV, a router, or a library. When you allow someone to rule over you, then they become god.
Well, you know what they say: the living language embiggens the soul.
If you get this, we're 10 of a kind.
Here's a great example: my sons, 6 and 5, are being taught a different writing style. It's called D'Nealian Handwriting, and here is a sample of it. It's basically italics, with curly-q's at the end of each letter, and slanted letters.
Now you may ask, why the heck do we need a new writing style to teach our youngsters? Well, one of the big reasons given is that it makes the transition to cursive writing easier. Excuse me? Cursive? Other than to formulate a signature, perhaps, what real purpose does cursive writing have any more? Cursive should be like caligraphy: you want to learn it, you take a special class, maybe as an elective in high school.
But of course, in true modern education style, the teachers don't actually care whether my kids learn to formulate their letters WELL or anything. So the end result is, my kids have crappy writing and are developing bad habits in a writing style that's, in my opinion, harder to read in the first place. I've had to download practice sheets to print out to work to get their letter formation to something even marginally readable.
And they're already smart enough to see how stupid all this is - the end result is they've already got an unhealthy disrespect for the whole teaching process, which can only hinder things.
So don't just blame everything on technology. Our educators have a big piece of this pie too.
Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.
Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.
The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.
Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only game in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.
Clive James in The Guardian -- Saturday April 30, 2005
Insert witty sig here.
It's very tempting to sit around with my colleagues at lunchtime and say stuff like, "Students these days..." --- fill in the blank: "...can't write," "...can't do algebra," "...don't apply themselves," "...are disrespectful." The problem is that there's no evidence. The ancient Greeks were complaining about this kind of stuff thousands of years ago. By linear extrapolation, we should all have reverted by now to sitting on tree limbs and flinging our poop at passersby.
It's actually extraordinarily difficult to measure changes in this kind of stuff over time. For instance, IQ scores have been going up over the last century, but nobody can agree whether that's a real effect or a mistake in the methods of sampling and measurement -- and even assuming it's a real effect, nobody can agree on what's been causing it. When it comes to college students, one problem is that college education is vastly more common today than it was in 1906, and it's not valid to compare an educational elite of 1906 with a much less highly selected population of students today. Same deal with No Child Left Behind: fifty years ago, we didn't even try to educate severely disabled kids, and we also didn't do much more than go through the motions with poor immigrant kids.
Find free books.
The observation that language is in a constant state of change is true. What is so interesting about the way language is changing today is the speed and the direction. Language is a direct reflection of how fast things change. Language is, in part, the way we describe that change.
Change, as noted by "Future Shock" and several more reputable sources, has accelerated in the past fifty years at breakneck speed. Discussions of our inability as people to absorb all of this change have led to the by now familiar "Singularity" discussions. If even a fraction of this is true, it would stand to reason that language and its use would be one of the first place this all manifests.
I am less interested in protecting the "King's English" than I am with the ability of one generation to communicate with the next in a complex and meaningful way. There is plenty of well written discourse on the Internet. I do not see that declining. The ghettoization of language as a marketing tool worries me a bit more, since it is sold as a generational identity.
My conversations with people in their early twenties shows me they are just as bright and articulate as anyone. Their opinions on language are much different. One of my favorites is the compression of language and meaning in rap music. Rap is a great place to look at the elasticity of language. Aside from the "bitches and ho's " rhetoric, which is the low end of that artform, there is clear and skillful use of language, rhythm and tone at work.
The other movement in language is the migration to visual rather than verbal communication. Language is no longer just about words. Image has changed the way we speak, the way we communicate, the way we articualte. The "comic-book" culture may not be a bad thing. The issue is not about comics- this is a medium that has a powerful and complex ability to communicate. The issue is that it is used mostly to communicate sex and power fantasies. However, I find it interesting that Dan Clowes now has a weekly comic that runs in the New York Times Magazine.
There is some virtue to being a "keeper of the flame" as far a literature is concerned. But television, movies and the internet are changing the concepts of literature. In the 21st century, is a good library just books, or does it include DVDs and CDs as well?
Part of the issue might have to do with the definition of language. If we insist on sticking to the definition where language is exclusively the written word, then language indeed might be in trouble, but not for the reasons mentioned.
Distribution of comic books in America today is at a fraction of what it once was. During the WWII era distribution figures in the millions for a single issue are normal, whereas in today's industry an issue is a huge success if it can manage to sell 100,000 copies.
Another way of looking at it is asking yourself how old are all the universally-known properties? None outside of maybe Spawn (which is crap now, and only well-known for that crappy movie) are less than 30 years old. Superman? Batman? Wonder Woman? Flash? Spider-man? X-Men? Captain America? Thor? Hulk? Most of them come from two eras, depression/WWII (Superman, Batman, anything else by DC), and the 60s, (Spider-man, X-Men, anything else by Marvel.)
Perhaps slightly off-topic, but it's unfair to label today's generation as the "comic book generation", as if the "ubiquity" of comics today is related to the rapid change in language. Comics were FAR more ubiquitous 70-40 years ago, during the "golden" and "silver" ages. How rapidly was the language changing then? Today's generation would much more accurately be called the Internet generation, not the comic book generation.
This closely ties in with the recent article about college students being unable to decipher credit card agreements.
Basically :
If you cannot read an End User License Agreement and understand what it is saying, you need to improve your English skills. NOW.
Legalese is the last bastion of specifically correct, carefully worded, properly formed English. Even words such as "shall" or "should" - the meaning of which can usually be inferred in everyday English - are often explicitly defined to avoid confusion. And you can be damned sure that Legalese is not going anywhere soon. If you can't comprehend Legalese (or any form of complex English), you're going to end up in a whole lot of trouble one day down the track. If you can comprehend it, you essentially have a grasp of the correct structure and form of Modern English.
The leet-speak, IM'ing crowd can poo-pooh it as much as they want, but learning correct English will serve you well in the future.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
All writing systems are symbolic, including phonetic ones. A proper classification of Blissymbolics is that it is ideographic. The ideographs themselves tend to be indices (essentially, signs that have some structural relationship to that which they signify).
Attila the Hun didn't sack Rome because of his masterful literary skills. Nor did the Visigoths, the Ostrigoths, or any of the other barbrian hordes that had a hand in Rome's destruction. Mainly they used superior weaponry and military tactics, and I think we're pretty covered there.
What a generalization! That's like saying people, take those who write rap music for instance, who use slang and street/urban language don't have the ability (or have a reduced ability) to communicate using proper grammar and spelling to convey their thoughts in settings where that kind of language is required.
Now if you're suggesting that people who use abbreviated or coded language that was derived from proper modern english grammar are preferring to use that language more often, perhaps it's because there are more of those kinds of people to associate with that use or read that kind of language. It's similar to how something moves from a fad to a trend to a subculture to a fully accepted part of everyday life.
OMG! A new way to communicate is upon us.
He also states he wants students to study Latin (I did, for 6 years) and minor in English Literature.
These two assertions make him a complete fool - and not worth the pixels he's used.
His concept may be correct, but his ability to deliver his message has itself been ruined due to his inability to remain neutral and objective on the topic. He's also failed to address the central thesis of his article, and this is:
"Failure in language causes an inability to think clearly, to create complex inventions inside the skull, and to communicate effectively with other human beings."
Frankly, the only thing which seperates us from animals is language. Tool use and large brains are not uncommon, only we have created language to extend our brains and knowledge beyond our inherent abilities.
Poor language skills will ALWAYS be fine to exchange pleasantries, stupid repartee, insults, and a wide range of human ideas, but they will NEVER permit the creation or accurate dissemination of complex new ideas.
In other words, it lies at the very heart of human ability.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Please mod this parent up. This doesn't deserve the flamebait moderations it's recieved. Sure, the author of the parent post may have damaged some people's egos a bit, but encouraging today's youth to read well-written literature outweighs the importance of anybodys ego. I can understand the net-speak on cellphones, as it would take forever to send information otherwise. Really though, why is it that someone who tells the truth gets modded 40% flamebait?
I too am sick and tired of seeing "dont" instead of "don't", and "im" instead of "i'm".
In an earlier post I cited Dan Clowes NY Times Magazine comic strip. It is in fact authored by Chris Ware. Apologies.
Given those kind of assumptions, I tend to doubt the majority of them could accurately describe a thought, emotion, person, or place if their lives depended upon it. Certainly not well enough to form a descriptive paragraph. And it's been proven time and again that if you don't have the words for somethiing, you can't wrap your head around it mentally, nor think about it coherently.
Besides, it's just, like, being lazy. You know?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
...so I suppose it doesn't matter much how good your grammar is.
Of course, I'll test for other things as well. Unfortunately, this may be a humbling experience for some applicants.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Every post I make begins with the assumption P=~P.
I'm sure somebody has posted something similar already, but HOLY CRAP, does anybody else have superiors who don't seem to think it necessary to proofread notes to their minions? It seriously bugs me -- am I really that unimportant? The answer their is probably yes, at least in my boss' mind. But damn. I always read what I've written before I send it out. Is it really that hard? I've actually received e-mails where having to infer a comma drastically changes the meaning of what I'm being asked to do. Salient Simpsons example: Lionel Hutz and "no money down" vs "no, money down!" Oh well, only one more year of being an undergraduate slave.
Unless a way is found of boosting intelligence, there isn't going to be a solution to the problem of bad writing, but it will probably become less visible when the present text-based methods of communication (or non-communication) are superseded for most people by speech-based methods, derived from VOIP or whatever. Those of us who read and write may, at worst, be left with faint traces of the horde's brief invasion, if such ugly spellings as "u" for "you" persist, but so what? The English language was perhaps richer and more subtle when we wrote "ye" in the nominative and "thou" or "thee" in the singular, but we didn't enter a dark age when we stopped doing so.
Having chosen English as the preferred language in the EEC, the European Parliament has commissioned a feasability study in ways of improving efficiency in communications between Government departments.
European officials have often pointed out that English spelling is unnecessary difficult; for example: cough, plough, rough, through and thorough. What is clearly needed is a phased programme of changes to iron out these anomalies. The programme would, of course, be administered by a committee staff at top level by participating nations.
In the first year, for example, the committee would suggest using 's' instead of the soft 'c'. Sertainly, sivil servants in all sities would reseive this news with joy. Then the hard 'c' could be replaced by 'k' sinse both letters are pronounsed alike. Not only would this klear up konfusion in the minds of klerikal workers, but typewriters kould be made with one less letter.
There would be growing enthusiasm when in the sekond year, it was anounsed that the troublesome 'ph' would henseforth be written 'f'. This would make words like 'fotograf' twenty per sent shorter in print.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reash the stage where more komplikated shanges are possible. Governments would enkourage the removal of double letters which have always been a deterent to akurate speling.
We would al agre that the horible mes of silent 'e's in the languag is disgrasful. Therefor we kould drop thes and kontinu to read and writ as though nothing had hapend. By this tim it would be four years sins the skem began and peopl would be reseptive to steps sutsh as replasing 'th' by 'z'. Perhaps zen ze funktion of 'w' kould be taken on by 'v', vitsh is, after al, half a 'w'. Shortly after zis, ze unesesary 'o' kould be dropd from words kontaining 'ou'. Similar arguments vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
Kontinuing zis proses yer after yer, ve vud eventuli hav a reli sensibl riten styl. After tventi yers zer vud be no mor trubls, difikultis and evrivun vud fin it ezi tu understand ech ozer. Ze drems of the Guvermnt vud finali hav kum tru.
Maybe we are just witnessing the birth of the future "common" tongue. Particularly with so many non-native english speakers getting their first introduction to the language via the internet.
The fact that the author used the term "comic book generation" shows a decline in his writing. I'm 30 years old, and I have never read a comic book. It's a stupid way to sum up my generation or the next, and it shows the hypocrisy of the author.
How can we expect young Americans to write better English when their president can barely speak it?
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
my spelling sucked long before i got email access...all email and bitnet (pre-AIM) did was get rid of my capitals and punctiation...
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Sometimes I can practically feel my brain eroding away.
Math is a different matter. No student should be allowed to bring a calculator into a math class. Ever.
This is when I stopped reading TFA. So, pray tell, master of what is wrong with education, when exactly should our intrepid students learn to use a calculator, one of the most useful inventions since we got rid of the slide rule?
This a falicious argument that when taken to its logical conclusion implies that all students should understand particle physics in order to use the web. While it may be true that learning how to do long division gives a student some greater insight into how math works, that doesn't mean that it is useful to them. I know how to do long division, and I think I understand division a little better because I do, but was the three years it took to learn in elementary school worth it? I've used this "greater understanding" maybe 4 or 5 times in my life. I don't think it was worth 3 years of my young life, when I could've been learning something more relevant to modern life.
There are lots of things that are useful to know, but we're not going to learn all of them. And teaching kids things we learned just because we had to, has more to do with bitterness about things like long division and less to do with their success in life.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
Spoken languages evolve quickly - once it's written down, the pace of change slows. If the written language is frequently spoken (in English, think of Shakespeare or the King James bible) the pace of change slows still further.
Texting/instant messaging is really a spoken language - the fact it's in ASCII just confuses the issue.
The price of Wikipedia is eternal vigilance
1) Try to grade a set of English papers.
2) Read Less Than Words Can Say by Richard Mitchell.
3) Stop and contemplate whether it is really in the best interest of the younger generation to speak and write in a way that makes them uncomprehesible to the older generation.
Then ask yourself: is the language changing in order to become more flexible (a la Shakespeare), or is the language changing in order to accommodate more sloppy thinking? Both could be true in different cases, of course, but on average -- which is the case?
Language is a tool, no more and no less. If you want to mod the tool, then fine. But if in the process you wreck that tool, then your mods need some more thought.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
"The youth (in America anyway) don't seem to care about anything past their immediate sensory input."
They are exactly what corporations and politicians want: A shallow, ignorant, vapid mass that only wishes to be entertained.
there are people who are brittle, almost autistic about their signifiers
if i write:
the dog ate the bone, the dog was happy
or i write:
The dog ate the bone. The dog was happy.
i've said the same thing, communicated the same idea, made the same point
again: communication is what is important. if i can recreate the idea in your head with the minimum of effort required, i've done my job. everything else, ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING ELSE, is superfluous and unnecessary
the first sentence is no different than the last, but for someone with a brittle mind, the lack of capitals or periods screams at them, proves difficult for them to digest. these people need the periods and the caps, because their minds are stuck on them
so i have an idea: rather than make the world easier for the people with brittle unyeiding minds, why don't we fucking let the people with brittle minds off at the next bus stop, and proceed on without them?
what are they adding besides a loud insistence upon obeying superfluous rules, because of their own mental difficulties? WHAT ELSE ARE THEY ADDING
why is it my job to exert more effort because you have a brittle, unyeilding mind?
my lack of capitals and periods is not the noise that has to be pushed through to get at the root of what is being communicated. YOUR MENTAL DIFFICULTY IS THE NOISE THAT NEEDS TO BE PUSHED THROUGH
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Wild Bill's /http://wildbill.purezc.com/scripts/imgrammarbot/> IM Grammarbot makes corrections in chat rooms where some of the worst usage of grammar abounds.
Just read what that bot does and you will be amazed at how only nine types of errors can be found and corrected.
If you really want to dig into this topic, find out more about rhetorical communities. You are a member of many. Tony Long (TFA author) is a member of many, too. His rhetorical communities don't overlap well with people that communicate using other methods (such as SMS and email slang) and because of that, he thinks there's a problem.
His main thesis can be found in this paragraph.
He doesn't back up the supposition that "the language" (English?) is dying at all except by talking about jargon and how people misunderstand each other's email.Jargon is vocabulary, not de-evolution of a language. It's been around as long as language has existed. What one person calls jargon is, to a person in another rhetorical community, clear speech. If I call someone a hacker, it means one thing to RMS and his rhetorical community, another to my mother. TFA is full of jargon, too. What's a CEO? It's not described in the article. What does geeky mean to you? Is it the same as what it means to him? Regardless, Tony Long knows his audience will know those terms, and so he uses them appropriately.
As for misunderstanding what another person is saying, he's way off base. An evolving language is not the root cause of people misunderstanding each other. Communication is inexact, always has been, and always will be. If it weren't for misunderstood communication, Shakespeare's comedies would never have been written.
People are becoming members of more rhetorical communities, and that's presenting new challenges to communication. It's nothing new, though. The printing press brought many people into new rhetorical communities, so did the telephone. The emergence of other new forms of communication is bound to do that as well.
Language exists to communicate and people are communicating more than every before. If people are communicating more effectively, where is the problem? Really, articles like this boil down to the same kind of screeds as "What are kids these days listening to anyway? In my day we had good music".
Don't misunderstand me, I write for a living, and I cherish good writing (take a look at Brevity for what I'm reading right now). TFA's author thinks there's only one kind of good writing, and he's wrong about that.
"Its speed and informality sing a siren song of incompetent communication, a virtual hooker beckoning to the drunken sailor as he staggers along the wharf.
But it's not enough to simply vomit out of your fingers."
With clumsy, heavy-handed metaphors like these, I think he's a part of the problem.
All he has to do now is compare someone who writes poorly to Hitler exterminating the Jews, and he'll be all set.
Go back to your cave, Luddite. Language changes, and the older generations always scoff at the changes that the younger create.
...I mean, they didn't call it "The Vulgate" for no reason.
I think what is at issue is that with the rise of universal education, we've demanded that everyone speak, read and write at a level of education that has not commonly existed but for the last century, really, just the last few decades. If you took random samples of 18yos in the early 19th century and today, no doubt you would be far more horrified at the former's ability to communicate than the latter.
I remember reading an article recently which argued that the distressing thing about the intellectual state of civilization isn't that we aren't producing great minds the way we used to, it's that there are now so many, in so many highly specialized fields, that people have a hard time keeping track of those outside their field of specialization (arguably, even within), ergo, everyone is under the illusion that all is going to hell simply because they can't grasp the volume of advances that are being made.
... written by one of Sega's game producers, who theorised that the large number of ways to get a message from one party to the other these days is causing the degradation of the quality of the communication.
In times past, to get a message to someone you had to write them a letter. Then came the telephone. Now we have mail, phone, email, mobiles, SMS, instant messaging and so on and so forth. The wider choice of mediums for the communication means that many people aren't capable of using any one medium to its fullest potential for the clarity and quality of their message. Jack of all trades/mediums, king of none.
My pet peeve with the (ab)use of the langauge these days is people writing a sentence that either includes an incorrect negative or leaves a negative out, thus completely flipping their sentence/statement/instruction from its original intention into informing me or asking me to do something thats the polar opposite of what they want.
We all need inbuilt automatic proofreaders. Roll on, implants...!
If literacy rates seem to be falling, as the Wired commentary notes, it's likely because:
All these makes illiteracy, which has always been present in American society, much more conspicuous and difficult to hide.
Literacy rates in the early part of the century, up until the 1950's, were high compared to today. In recent years, we have been seeing a sharp decline. Comic books were one of the first scapegoats, along with dancing, masturbation, radio, television, and color of skin. The numbers are still falling and the newest scapegoat is ... IM's and email. *belCh*
... We've all heard at least one of these items implicated as a contributor to illiteracy. I believe the cause or at least, the most significant contributor, is education.
I actually read that pagers were to blame in one mid-90's article. The act of spelling with a touchtone keypad was somehow dumbing kids down. Cell phones, video games, lack of after school programs, television, cartoons, violence, fast food, candy
A few decades ago, our educators decided to undertake an experiment with language and reading. They eliminated the use of phonics and replaced it with a new repetition based training method (Cat in the Hat is an example). Instead of constructing words by sound, children were encouraged to learn spelling and reading by vocabulary drills and other tasks concerned with memorization alone. Repetition was the key to effective teaching in this new philosophy.
When some children began to have problems with the new curriculum, educators didn't necessarily view it as failure. Some of these students were put into categories like "special needs." People often wrongly assume that public education is a scientific institution. They reflect the full range of human biases for the period. They aren't bound by the scientific method, so they do not use it.
I've always heard that the ability to write coherently is the result of the inability to think coherently.
I remember reading an Asimov story (don't remember the title, maybe I'm remembering a couple) and one of the points of the story was that the population at large couldn't read or do math because they were so used to computers solving things and speaking to them.
Maybe several hundred years in the future this will be a porblem, but I do more reading and math dealing with computers than I ever did at school. I can't stand to wait for audio commentaries when I can read 20 times faster than I can listen to it. Is there anyone here who works in IT that *doesn't* use some math skills on a regualar basis? I know that mine have improved with my computing skills.
Language doesn't degenerate. It just changes. Snow Crash had a really cool explanatin for why language fragments instead of consolidates. I have also read studies showing a parallel between the increasing complexity of kid's entertainmnet (mostly videogames) and increasingly early mental development in kids.
Only history will tell. Unless we screw up and we all die or are too busy surviving to worry about history.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
maybe its not a bad thing, maybe this generation is evolving a better means to communicate with itself. In psychology class we studied communication via body language, tone, inflection, spoken word, and written word. Although we revere writing for its contribution to society we have to admit that it is a sucky means of accurately communicating ideas and emotions. You are reading this now, and you think you understand, but you are really only grasping a small percentage of what I am trying to say.
Reading and writing were ok for a few millenia, but they cant compete with todays super-media like comics and moving pictures. Or perhaps its more balanced to say that graphical communication techniques are just as noble as the written word, and each has its place.
My English usage isn't perfect, but I do try; I'm one of those guys who fusses over not putting an apostrophe in "its" when expressing something possessed by "it" because the apostrophe is only for "It is".
... even in closing million-dollar deals. (But the deal is finally put to paper by lawyers who literally DO construct their English the way a programmer writes a program...) The casual E-mail usage is the price of a LOT more communication happening in a typical office worker's life than 50 years ago, the price of more productivity.
I find that when I take the trouble to be careful of my English usage, it gets me automatic respect - a hearing of what I have to say even in a roomful of corporate senior management.
I also very deliberately roughen up my usage, include slang and grammatic errors, when talking to the labour force that haven't picked up a book since high school. (But I never over-act, which is always obvious to people for whom it is normal speech; I just relax my speech to the way I talked in high school.)
Why? To not put them off. In Britain, and almost as much in North America, grammar and sentence construction are as background-based ("class-based" if you must) as the accents on your vowels. Carefully correct usage automatically sounds upper class to most people.
While spouting alarmist arm-waving about Good English going by the way, try to remember that a few generations back, very few people spoke like Sherlock Holmes or wrote like Ernest Hemingway; 80% of the population sounded more like the lower-class characters in the same novels. "Ain't" was probably twice as common as it is today in America. I heard phrases like "She brung it", or "I seen it" MORE often as a child (in the 60's) than I do today - and even then it was often older people.
Meanwhile, I notice that almost all the *well-regarded* bloggers use decent English, with clear sentence construction and few errors, even though most are dashing off a first draft straight to the blog.
The most popular fiction in history - Harry Potter - is about teenagers and both the dialogue and narration are in excellent English, and modern teenagers identify with them despite their lack of slang and smileys.
There are a few things deteriorating. More business communication is quite casual; it's easier to send an E-mail that write a paper letter, so a lot more casual usage is accepted because of the medium
The other thing running downhill is English usage by the media. It used to be that almost no error of grammar or spelling slipped past a newspaper editor. Now one sees them every day.
But I'm about 1% as concerned by that as I am by the amount of awful things in the world that the media doesn't write a single word about, while concentrating on the personal lives of celebrities.
Let's see some (more) alarmism about THAT.
Firstly I do not think the average slashdotter is that "more intelligent". True they are better at some task, everything related to computer, but worst at other (I would point out socializign for example but that would be cruel and overgeneralizing. let us say litterature and grammtic and you will have to agree ;)). By overspecialising in a task you might look brighter than the average at thzat task but that does not proove intelligence.
Furthermore the complaint about grammatic and spelling would be fairly OK IF and only IF slashdot was a web site visited by english speaking people only. But this is not the case. Many people here around do not have english as their primary or even secondary language. Thus from point 1 and 2 , slashdot is the wrong example.
The day most "english grammar dictator" (I would rather avoid the Godwin law and use the other term), descend from their podest/soap box and try to think in a foreign language, and post completly coherently in that foreign language, with perfect spelling and grammatic, I will bow to them down. But until then it is only a band of prick which do not understand the value of content versus form.
As for the language changing, with sms-speak, this is not my observation. When i was young there was OTHER type of special speak for the youth. Hyppie Speak. Reverse Speak later (in my country. just imagine reversing syllable, like : Women change into menwo). Well it does not seem that those have broken the language, did not they ? Those do not stick to litterature, and certainly you do not see them stickting in important works, like when you redact your PhD...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
You win at Slashdot comments. Seriously.
As for the CONTENT of your reply, I still am not inclined to agree. "While remaining cognizant of the rules and informed by convention" is quite a big leap to make.
+++ATH0
I have decided that when I hire [may have meant "conduct testing prior to hiring"] techs, I am going to ask ["require"] them to write an essay, using pen and ink, [uneeded commas] giving the [incorrect definite article] intructions [spelling] on how to use a mouse for someone who is a computer beginner. [poor sentence structure] (Think your grandmother). [fragment] No internet research allowed. This tests several things. [Are you referring to the restriction on internet research? Also, a colon is missing here.]
I have decided that when I hire [may have meant "conduct testing prior to hiring"] techs, I am going to ask ["require"] them to write an essay, using pen and ink, [uneeded commas] giving the [incorrect definite article] intructions [spelling] on how to use a mouse for someone who is a computer beginner. [poor sentence structure] (Think your grandmother). [fragment] No internet [capitalization missing] research allowed. This tests several ["four"] things. [Are you referring to the restriction on Internet research? Also, a colon is missing here.]
1. Penmanship. [fragment] Can I read their writing or their field notes, or is it all garbage? [false dichotomy]
2. Their technical understanding. [fragment] Mouse operation is a common and simple task, but elements like right click, down button vs [missing period] up button actions, [This is unclear. Are you referring to "moving" vs. "dragging"? I'm unsure whether to criticize the missing hyphens or the solecism "button actions" here.] etc. are not immediately intuitive. [redundant]
3. Their ability to communicate. [fragment] Can they communicate something they understand in a clear and concise fashion? Especially [sic - should be "particularly"] to someone [sic - should be "those"] without expertise or substantial experience in the field. [fragment]
4. Can they get to the point, or is the essay filled with lots of [unneeded intensifier] technical fluff, jargon, and assorted filler?
Of course, I'll test for other things as well. [Such as?] Unfortunately, this [unclear antecedant] may be a humbling experience for some applicants.
Fine, if "u want 2 rite" like that I'm sure your friends will know what you mean. Try that when you need to apply for a job and see how far you get.
Just because you don't care how people older than you speak doesn't mean you'll never interact with them. You don't have to have to be an English Professor but at least know how to spell!
It's about communication not grammar.
FWIW, in any realtime chat, I usually leave the beginnings of sentences uncapitalized, and usually don't end single sentences with a period (the period is implied). Realtime stuff like IMs are comprised of back-and-forth sentence fragment exchanges, and don't benefit as much from proper grammar and punctuation.
Everywhere else (email, message board posts, whatever) I write relatively properly. I think this is pretty standard today.
Linux is STILL for fags.
I could go on. Much, much of the West's sum total of knowledge was lost during the Dark Ages. That is why they are called dark!
Seems to be all these comments seem to depict the english language only. Are the other languages less cross-bred and more pure and do not surcome to as much slang.
"O RLY ? YA RLY!", I'd like to see that in japanese.
Saw a license plate the other day that made me laugh - "OMGWTF".
...want the quality of writing to increase, you must lead by example. In your own emails and text messages use appropriate spelling and punctuation; it will rub-off on someone.
so everyone is in agreeance, right?; our language has gotten badder.
The problem isn't that technology is eroding our language. The problem is that schools are not hiring good teachers and only teaching to a standardized test. Teachers unions who protect the crappy teachers and hold back the really good ones from making a name for themselves are part of the blame. Federal and state mandated "minimums" force schools to teach to those minimums, and nothing else are the other big part of the blame.
I don't claim to be a spectacular writer or speller, but I was taught a much more in depth curriculum than kids are these days. They don't get the history and full understanding of what they are being taught. They aren't taught to have pride in getting things right. And when they get something wrong, they are told it is ok. I thought it was the end of the world the first time I got a C. But parents and teachers today seem to be telling their kids "hey, it isn't failing, so everything is ok".
Another huge gap in education today (and not just at school) is a lack of responsibility. People need to be held responsible when they do something wrong or screw up. You don't have to beat your kids into submission, but if their grades drop because they are goofing off or get caught drinking, punish them. The sooner they learn there are consequences to bad decisions the better they will be in life.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
I know I'm getting modded down about it. And to that person clicking the downvote button right now, I say: you have the soul of an ant.
The reason that we don't have spelling and grammar checkers built into the OS is because it is assumed that anyone who can afford a computer has already passed a level of advanced education and literacy. However that isn't true since computers are now so cheap and widespread that they are used regardless of level of academic compentency.
We do already have OS built-in spell checkers. Check your facts, please. (hint: Mac OS X).
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
...is very poorly written!
Wasn't it named the Dark Ages during the Enlightenment? I mean, for contrast between the new philosophy of "dare to know" and the old philosophy of setting fire to everyone you could, just to be sure? Perhaps someone with a PhD in classical studies would know better than I would.
And how did "literacy surviving" become monks copying old manuscripts, contributing little or nothing of their own? Hell, more of what we got from the ancients was preserved by the Muslims, and recovered when the Moors in Spain fell, and the Dark Age Christians uncharacteristically didn't torch one of their libraries.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I recall a Usenet post about five or eight years ago where the poster complained that he could find nothing on the Internet on the subject of the Irish "potatoe famen". Today, I notice that Google makes a good guess at interpreting that phrase.
However I'm not sure what could be done with an email I once received asking for information. (I'm sorry I didn't save it.) It had no punctuation or capitalization, and little indication where one sentence ended and the next began. I tried to figure out what the individual wanted, but gave up on the realization that I could interpret what he wrote as at least _three_ entirely different questions, depending where I inserted punctuation.
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme?entry =the_cultural_diffusion
"The result would be escalating costs expressed as information problems - miscommunication, cultural conflicts, etc.
Eventually, the net benefit of diversity should exceed its societal benefits and produce a big drop in the price of information as demand falls off"
The article doesn't say much, but it does point to some other references that were quite insightful, such as the one about email often not being understood because the authors are too often writing egocentrically rather than thinking about how the recipient of their communications would understand what they said. And at least the author doesn't waste more than a sentence or two on LOL/ROFL/etc., which is really just the same HYKGOML kids-these-days rant that most generations of elders inflict on young people's slang and music and evolution of their language. Ranting about 5-second soundbites and the need to think before writing are more valuable.
It surprises me that he fails to rant about kids not using spell checkers and grammar tools on their writing, since they're obviously close at hand when using most email clients and pretty much transparent.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
frsit psot!
Has anyone tried to read their Doctor's handwriting? Just because his penmanship looks like a 5-year old's doesn't make him incompetent. You can take that chicken scratch to any other Doctor/Nurse and they'll know exactly what it says. Using Jargon and abreviations speeds up communication between like groups. Hell, in some cases abreviations and substitutions can actually improve communication. Think of using long-range radios. Someone not communicating by a writer's literacy standard in every e-mail doesn't make them an idiot.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
I read a story on /. until a condition is satisfied, as in: READ... UNTIL. My condition for this submission was: read until the first comment that, more or less, stated that language is flexible and that the erosion of written English should be expected, even embraced, by text messagers who lack command of proper written English, preferring instead to express themselves with whatever is easiest on their thumbs.
It was your comment - second post. Congratulations. It almost never happens that quickly.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
Do kids read comic books anymore?
I'm 46, when I was kid, the racks at the 7-11s were crammed with commic books. I think some were as cheap as $0.12.
Now they're called graphic novells, and they cost about $8, they are very slick, and they are not really written for kids.
Today, comic book heros are for movies, and video games, not "comic books."
You are right; this is not the comic book generation, it's their kids. The people who grew up reading comic books write pretty well. Comic books have some slang, but the spelling and grammar aren't bad. More importantly, they are clear and comprehensible.
A lot of parents these days would be grateful if they could get their kids to read comic books. When it comes to learning to write, it is far more important to read a lot than to read quality literature.
Spelling has taken a nosedive and I've watched it fall. Some of my friends cannot differinate between no and know or to, too, and two, or their, there, and they're. At first I thoguht maybe this was rare, but it's disturbingly common. Spell checkers are really ruining lives because people will simply accept what it says instead of looking it up for themselves. I've been blessed with great spelling my whole life... not quite sure why, but I'm lucky. We really need stricter standards in schools for spelling, grammar, and vocabulary. My ex-girlfriend, for example, did not know the word "modest" as a senior in high school. And yet, she somehow was able to graduate with a 3.0. I think it goes beyond IM and email. There's this horrible trend, at least in California, of forcing students to do "art projects" in English classes. Instead of writing a 5-page paper on a book they read, students do a "story-board" or "board game" that consists of one page of actual writing and hours of gluing and other busywork exercises that belong in kindergarten. I've always hated those... not only do they discourage good writing, they inflate the grades of those that have no ability in English, and hurt the grades of the artisically retarded. (Me.) It's not just bad spelling, but intentionally bad spelling that actually takes longer to type. Like Ne 1 WanT 2 wurk On SunDae? There's this guy that works at my theater that posts on our Myspace group, constantly typing like that... There's NO WAY that this is easier than typing in normal English. If schools don't make English classes about English, the language will de/evolve further.
Spelling and grammar sloppiness irk me too, and I use spell checkers to supplement my sloppy typing abilities, not my innate understanding of the atrociously complex rules of English spelling, though grammar checkers mainly have an inadequate understanding of the beauties of complex grammar that our language affords - in general they either catch accidental double words or else bitch about sentences being too long even though they're perfectly correct.
However, lots of other bright hackers I know don't seem to instinctively grok English grammar or spelling the way they do artificial grammars such as C, Python, etc. It's not just sloppiness, or deliberate leet-speek jargon, and probably not just a lack of education (at least for native English-speakers and Indians) it's apparently a difference in the way they understand language. Frustrating to read, and their lack of use of spell-checkers and grammar-checkers _is_ sloppy, but it's a surprisingly strong pattern.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
communication is best when what is said is said as briefly as possible. the greatest communicators in the history of mankind are those who can say in 5 sentences what the common man needs 10 sentences to say. this rule applies to all aspects of communication: the briefer, the better. why waste people's time? when you add extra noise to the signal, you wind up possibly losing your audience because of the extra thought required and time required to understand you
then there are those, who on this issue of brevity, can only be described as "autistic": they are used to their communication having a particular, specific, traditional noise quality to their signal. remove that noise, their extra signifiers, which provide no extra communicative value whatsoever, and they have trouble decoding the signal. not because the communicator has communicated any less, but because this brittle, autistic audience needs its crutch. and they scream, and they moan
but communication is not made for their sake. communication is best when it has the least noise. the majority of the audience deals just fine with a briefer signal, of greater clairity, with less baggage and noise, and adapts to a superior status quo
the language will not be bent to the needs of brittle minds. brittle minds will instead be routed around and ignored, like any insane mental damage is routed around in life
language evolves. deal with it and adapt. or break, and become useless. your choice. but you don't own the language, because no one does. language evolves according to the needs to communicate, and along that need alone. less noise=more signal=better communication. there is no argument you can possibly pose which renders traditional but unnecessary extra noise as a permanent and necessary part of the signal
suck it up brittle minds
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
vb.net is case insensitive. c# is case sensitive. case adds no extra value, and in fact, due to the needs of the clr, c# programmers cannot have two functions with the same name, differing only in case, if they wish vb.net programmers to use their libraries. it's often a pain when you make a mistake programming and you use the wrong case when invoking a function. it just wastes time, time that does not need to be wasted. and even if the clr wasn't there to force caseless programming on c#/ c++ programmers, having 2 functions with the same name, differing only in case, within c++, is very confusing for the human mind
;-P
my point is not to shift the argument to one of c++ versus basic, which brings out a whole new class of retarded partisans on the subject, my point is simply to illustrate that case has no additional value, UNLESS YOU WANT TO SHOUT AT SOMEONE
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Lack of Literacy can be traced backed to today's educational system. Where teachers can get tenure for two years of work and their goal is to get on the school administration. This creates as educational system that is top heavy with managers and with few employees who care to teach. Why do you think teachers are so scared of pay being tied to the students performance. If a students grades are posted so everyone can see them they use a number so the student does not face any peer pressure. They are being taught from a young age that winning does not matter. That is not how the real world works.
I have seen what happens with this school system. I know a person who cannot hold a job as he thinks that he knows everything and he should run the business two days after being hired in the lowest position. He now has two kids, can't keep a job and found that the easy life he had in high school was not the same when he went to college....and then dropped out.
I've got a good parser and it can handle "OMG! ROTFLMAO!" with aplomb. That's a sentence with a clear meaning. I will, however, come to a painful crashing halt if I read something like "caused Apple to loose their lawsuit". Words have meanings. Loosing and losing are separate concepts and always will be separate concepts whatever the words are that represent them.
If you can't say what you mean, how can you mean what you say?
(I'm doomed now. I've complained about grammar in public. There is certain to be a humiliating typo in here somewhere.)
Some people who confuse similar sounding aren't lazy, but are dyslexic. Most of the time you think about these people not being able to unjumble letters.
e %20for%20Teachers.htm
Btw my fiancee is dyslexic. She didn't learn to read properly until she was about 14 though. She's also very smart (holds 2 degrees and is now a primary teacher). I was doing a crossword with her to kill time the other day waiting to see a doctor and giving her a hard time about some of her mis-spellings, because they were quite funny. I don't think of her as having a problem most of the time because she's witty and intelligent and it's just not the first thing that strikes me. Then later I was watching a documentary and dyslexia was mentioned and I felt like a horse's rear. She tends to spell phoentically because that's how she copes - by sounding it out in her head. She has to work a lot harder to not make mistakes when she's teaching.
So yeah a little more education would go a long way but so would a little more tolerance.
Have a look here. Do a more thorough search if you're actually interested:
http://buckhoff.topcities.com/Dsylexia%20A%20Guid
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This is something that people are always complaining about without really knowing much about how languages, or Language works. Unfortunately, most of the slashdotters that have been posting aren't really quite clear on what's going on either.
1) Language does change. There's no such thing as a change "for the worse" or "for the better." There's no language that lends itself more than any other towards communicating clearly. The problem arises most likely from the fact that people using SMSes and IMs and what-have-you are communicating with each other perfectly clearly. Adults, or the old world users of language, don't understand this register because they're not used to it. It's nothing inherent about the use of language, it's about how you're used to using it. Try taking a look at something written in the 19th or 18th century - It's difficult to read, because the writers and audiences at the time were used to a completely different sort of register.
2) Comic books are an amazing new venue. Look at "The Sandman" or "Watchmen." or "Maus." In the same way that movies blend images and spoken language, comics blend images and written language. Sure, there are a lot of purile comic books. But look at how science fiction got its start - cowboys and aliens. And the fact that most movies are relatively void of "literary value" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) doesn't mean that something good can't come out of that medium.
3) You can't seperate the medium and the message. Someone pointed out that it's the medium that's changing, not the message, but with every new medium comes a new way of looking at language that ends up fundamentally altering it.
4) Archaeologists don't say that language is always changing - Linguists do. Maybe he could've gotten half credit if he said "Anthropologists," but linguistics isn't a subfield of anthropology any more than physics is a subfield of math.
There have been several reports of children using calculators as simply a crutch in order to not learn long division or multiplication at all. In this case they ues the calculator as a cop out.
The main problem with modern mathematics education is that there's much less an emphasis on mental mathematics skills. I, for example, memorized the multiplication table at 3 and taught myself to do 'speed' mental math without the aid of a calculator. This has allowed me to perform calculations much quickly at higher levels of math, such as when generating a set of eigenvalues by hand, as well as consistently perform at a higher level than most of my peers who learned 'by the calculator'. Relevant to modern life? Mental mathematics allows you, for example, to walk into Costco and immediately compute the per ounce cost of a particular brand of beef compared to the other without having to whip out a calculator. Unless you consider modern life to be little more than 'create spreadsheet at work', 'push paperwork, 'go home and watch Gray's Anatomy', 'sleep', basic math skills are more than relevant to every aspect of a modern human being.
Although I dont agree with your quoted line, calculators should never be allowed into the hands of a student until that student has a firm grasp of basic mathematical functions. Calculators are meant to facilitate computation, and that's all.
There's an Asimov short story out there - "The Feeling of Power", detailing a society where no human remembers how to perform basic math but carries a pocket calculator. A technician who rediscovers the process of hand mathematics is hailed as a genius, and work begins on a missile with a human 'computer' inside to calculate trajectories. Read it in your spare time.
I have seen what happens with this school system. I know a person who cannot hold a job as he thinks that he knows everything and he should run the business two days after being hired in the lowest position. He now has two kids, can't keep a job and found that the easy life he had in high school was not the same when he went to college....and then dropped out.
People would have no problem keeping jobs if businesses would stop firing them. I graduated from a university and can't rent a job. Wages adjusted for inflation have plummeted in the last 30 years. Meanwhile housing costs and revolving credit have destroyed the savings and paychecks of tens of millions of people. Half of the working-age adults in this society are NOT employed in full-time regular permanent jobs.
Half.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Darn it! I *always* get that word wrong!
*writes out "grammar" 100 times*
Surely you must realize that calculus is a skill needed only by a very small percentage of the population, and of personal interest to a few more. It simply does not have practical application to the overwhelming majority of people. Being able to express one's self clearly and coherently is of enormous value to every person in society, every day. (Eloquence would be a bonus.) Like it or not, you are judged, at least in part, by how you present yourself and your ideas, and if you speak like a mouth breather, no one with an appreciation for intelligence is going to want to deal with you. So far as I'm aware, no one has ever been judged on how well they can comprehend multivariable calculus -- at least, outside of a classroom or job interview.
If someone can't be bothered to understand the most basic aspects of the physical world with which they interact on a daily basis
And yet we're not asking them to understand English on that nuanced level. A better analogy would involve basic arithmetic -- a useful, everyday skill that everyone needs. Comparing basic spelling and grammar to multivariable calculus is idiotic. We're not asking them to be know and be able to discuss the linguistic evolution of the English language or write breathtaking sonnets, okay? We're asking them to speak to other humans without sounding like complete knuckle-walkers. This is not a task comparable to understanding higher mathematics which they have absolutely no use for.
Fortunately, there are now tools available which allow poor spellers to communicate effectively even with those too narrow minded to overlook poor spelling.
Yeah, well, your spellchecker won't recognize the difference between "I helped my uncle Jack off the horse" and "I helped my uncle jack off the horse", but I will.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
You started a sentence with "Seriously". That little grammatical error really annoys me. Please add it to your list of things that cause you to blank people, then you might remember to avoid it yourself in future.
I'm posting anonymously because you're totally right about posts that correct people getting flamed, and because I don't want lose any karma.
I would point people interested in this topic to Steve Pinker's The Language Instinct. He makes a compelling argument against the above author's case that the slang used in instant messaging is 'violence' to English.
To summarize: Language is hard-wired into our brains as humans. We will automatically think in a pattern of grammar. Slang is subject to language rules as well. Email shorthand must also follow some logical pattern.
1) Children who grow up to immigrant parents who cannot speak the native language develop a pidgin language, then a creole with a precise structure and grammar. Within one generation, they have a stable and structured language with new elements shared by neither parent language.
2) Deaf children have formed a sign language independent of their teachers and used it to communicate successfully with each other. Upon inspection, this language had a logical structure as well. I believe this was the case of Nicaraguan sign language.
3) A deaf man who lived in isolation his entire life was able to learn sign language when found as an adult and communicate his experiences to that point. He was thinking without a 'real' language like English or sign for his entire life and able to translate that into sign language later.
4) Slang languages often have a grammatical pattern, too. A study of Ebonics revealed an underlying grammar that was in one way logically superior to English, according to Pinker.
If our current slang is indeed so special as to be unintelligible and ambiguous, whereas other generations' slang was not, then that's both a deviation and interesting achievement, but I'm not sure you can make that case to start with. Blogging and truthiness are words accepted by dictionaries and/or authority figures creating 'word of the year' lists. Those words started as slang and apparently developed credibility and a stable definition. There was presumably a point in their existence where they were ambiguous in definition, and other people did not understand their users, but you can't say that the thought processes of writer and reader were damaged in some way. There is nothing inherently special about slang that makes it detrimental to the mind, except perhaps its short lifespan. The author does not make this point, or any point, actually; he merely rails against people who can't write, grinds an axe, and couches it all in pretty phrases while offering no evidence to support his stance.
He emphasizes jargon as well. Purposely using words that are ambiguous, consistently, is problematic, agreed. I believe this is a danger, though not for the arrogant reason he states. People who read ambiguous statements constantly will attempt to analyze them and fail. They may eventually develop a distrust of written words in general or stop analyzing them from the start. If the average person suspect that they have no chance of understanding what the author of a memo meant, will they even read it? When people cease to comprehend the written word or are -taught- and -trained- to expect that it is unfathomable, -that- is a problem.
How many /. readers have ever put something down on paper to help articulate an idea? Organizing things out loud or in written form helps us organize our thoughts. A person who never learns to comunicate their ideas in a clear and concise manner is missing out on the ability to organize their thoughts. I'm willing to bet that people who can't communicate clearly are also the people who have a hard time in science courses, where complex ideas are being expressed. We see other articles on /. about the US lagging behind others in the science and tech industries, this is just another symptom. We can't excuse it away by saying "things change", or that these skills are becoming less important. Organized logical thought is interdependant on the ability to communicate well.
When I see an Introduction To Logic class where half the kids FAIL, I fear for the future.
So the article is saying that english is declining because of how poorly so many people are using it, based at least in part on the fact that communication is so quick and easy with email, which makes people less likely to think about what they are writing before they write it.
:)
However, I disagree. My theory is that what is happening is there have been a whole bunch of people who couldn't write very well, all along, and now they're on the internet, so anyone who *can* write well can see them.
Sure, there are a lot of poorly written blogs floating around out there.
And there are also a lot of well written blogs.
The problem isn't that less people know how to write; it's that more of the people who don't know how to write are writing.
I also happen to think that this problem will become less prevalent as more people spend time writing - because the more time people spend writing (and/or reading), the better they will become at it.
Of course, my theory is based entirely on personal observations, so there's nothing very scientific about it, but there ya go
Early bird may get the worm.. but the second mouse gets the cheese.
... just joking.
Seriously, that is an excellent piece to read. I won't name the faces that flashed past my mind as I read Mr. Orwell's thoughts.
To be sure, there were plenty of modern, talking-heads present in my mind.
A solid link for youngsters as myself (29) to read.
To clarify: Penmanship should be legible. You have a mis-understanding of the word garbage, in that in this case, the definition is: "Of such insufficient quality for meeting the requirements for which it is intended, that it should therefore be thrown out as the most efficient and proper method of handling and usage." Legibility, and the ability to put words together into semicoherent sentences is important.
Regarding Mouse actions: Where you click a mouse, there are in fact two control signals that are sent out. One is sent out when the pressing of the button down, the other is for the following return to an up position. When you click on an Internet link with the primary mouse button (i.e., Left Click), the start of the mouse button up signal initiates the chain of events that takes you to the next web page, etc.
When you submit a comment, and press the Submit Button, the release of the button is what sends the signal to submit the comment. If you press on the Submit button, hold it down, then move the mouse pointer to some other location, then release the button, the Submit request is not processed.
The use of the phrase "primary mouse button" is useful, because some people are left handed, and reconfigure the mouse to switch the functions of the buttons.
The phrase "not immediately intuitive" is useful in that it informs the person that there are elements that are not obvious, and that might require some work to master. It provides the psychological function of permitting the person the freedom to feel uneducated in a particular subject area, without feeling stupid. This permits easier learning.
Some folks blow things off as being too difficult if the subject matter is not instantly mastered, or spoon fed to them. The second aspect to using the phrase "not immediately intuitive" is the ability to break the subject at had to the several basic, fundamental, and relevant concepts that are needed to provide reasonable understanding for the task at hand. Basics and fundamentals are not always the same.
For example, your comment about the mouse click reveals an rather complete understanding of the basics of using a mouse while missing some of the fundamentals, which are not immediately intuitive.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You'll find a lot of (good) commentary about this subject at http://www.angryfrozenhead.com/ Read their "Generation iPod" article.
... yeah, same slob who got on AC a second ago ...
Fucking Orwell was on fire.
"Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality."
Wow. Interesting for sure. Damn.
"The airline pilot who announces that he is presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation wouldn't think of saying it may rain. The sentence is too simple - there must be something wrong with it."
And from another part of the book...
"Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:
'I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.'
Orwell's version goes:
'Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that sucess or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capactiy, but that a considerable amount of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.'"
From what I can see, educators are terrible about this sort of thing.
2. make a random selection
...VALID information, that is information found in the capital letters that cannot be ascertained from the letters themselves
;-P
3. reduce to lower case
now, tell me the information that is lost when you read the original versus the lowercased copy
for example, by saying the word "English" must be capitalized because the rule is that singular entities must be capitalized is just a useless rule. breaking the rule does not destroy information. if i write "english", you know what i am talking about, and you also know i am talking about the english, as opposed to one english among many englishes... there is only one english, duh! it's not like someone would be reading the document for the first time and encounter the capital "English" and go "hmmm, that's useful information, i did not know there is only one english language!" or "hmmm, this person is now referring to one particular english language, as opposed to the whole bunch of english languages"
now, if english referred to the language, and English referred to the nationality, then you would have a point. or if you meant English meant british english while english meant american/ australian english, then you would have a point. but none of those are the rules, now are they?
the only valid use of capitals for communicating meaning is with acronyms. for example, "US" refers to United States, while "us" is you and i. so if i said to you "he stopped trading with the us" who is us? but there you go: you say "the us", so not even acronyms need to follow caps!
ALL I CAN THINK CAPS ARE VALID FOR IS INDICATING YOU ARE SHOUTING AT SOMEONE
prove me wrong. show me a case where capitalizing a word provides meaning that is not already contained within context/ the word itself
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Waht?
No it hasn't. Well, not so much as your comment has.
Indeed.
word?
English language is my second. I will not make a judgement, just basing myself on the history of the language... but on the education system itself. I can only judge by the education system in the US, and can tell you one thing. The patterns you are seeing now, are just peanuts to the horrible reputation to come... Please dont blame the IM and cell phones. I beg you. First make your children read, then take their phones away, not the other way around :)
For us in the real world, the Mac doesn't exist. It's just a beautiful picture in a magazine, like Lindsay Lohan. We have Windows and if we can get it working, Linux.
its not happening your just confused. Oh my bad.
You can read Orwell's essay here.
For the past two years, I've been a teaching assistant in college humanities classes. Some of my students came back to college after working in business. These students are usually highly motivated, but some of them have trouble writing clearly because the business world has taught them to write in Newspeak instead of English. I've found it helpful to show such students the Ecclesiastes example from Orwell's essay.
re-hello :-)
Kids do not have time to learn grammer.
Grammer does not pay the bills G.
And it won't get me my digs and bleem bleem.
OTOH
Could be that they ain't being taught and no one is putting them in check.
Those kids folks might not have the means to send thier kids for a proper schooling.
and holmes, I don't need to learn english to roll with my set. You know it's all a goverment conspiracy for the new world order. Coz they all want us to talk and act the same.
rotfl
c-ya
l33t Hax0r
shout out to my cr3w
Thats all I have to say about that.
You are correct, I mispoke. Attila never made it to Rome, but his incursions in the early 450s contributed to softening up the Romans for the extended sack by the Vandals in 455. Mea culpa.
That was a terrific post. By the way, did you know that the word "pharmaceutical" is misspelled on the front page of your web site?
There isn't job in the tech field that doesn't require good communication skills. If you can write c#, but you can't write English, or even know the difference between "your", "you're", and "yore", the problem is not intelligence. Guess what! We spend "a significant portion of our lives" learning to do lots of things. Clear communication happens to be one of those things.
If multivariable calculus were a task that I had to perform on a daily basis, you can bet that I'd want to make the effort to learn it. (On a side note, my idea of "basic physics" doesn't involve advanced calculus)
i'm not arguing about commas, nor have i ever
so that leaves you just this:
come in, may, will you?
if i say it is stupid to eat cheese, and you reply "but peanut butter tastes good" have you countered my statement?
so why do you think you just said something useful?
no grammar will help a failure to keep track of logic
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
for a flexible mind
it is difficult for a brittle mind
so i win: brittle people i do not want to deal with don't read what i say
i don't lose the attention of anyone i want to talk to, and i chase away pedantic small minds who stumble over the slightest of variations
these same inflexible minds usually don't bring anything of value to a conversation as it is, they lack perception, imagination, mental agility
oh poor me, all of the dim bulbs dislike my grammar
(snicker)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well, first of all, take my post with an ample amount of salt, since i am not a native english speaker, so what i have to say might not hold true for your language and your cultural context. But there are several factors that create these behaviours and tendancies: first of all its a sign of the contemporary times, we barely have time to compose short messages, communications are very quick (i realize its a gross generalization but nontheless) The medium has an effect on the message, many IM-clients as well as sms impose a limit on characters, use these ways of communication enough and you will see it affect your language. Class, now i realize mentioning class on a primarily american board might seem trollish, but still, it's a fact that here (dunno about the US), it would seem schools in primarily working class areas are inadequatly funded, lacking discipline and they dont have the resources to see to that everyone can take part in literature in a meaningful manner, i would imagine that public schools in poor american areas has the same syndrome. And here the upper middle class clearly fosters their kids to study and take time to talk to them, whereas the working class just dont have the time. Immigration, here the short and sloppy language is mixed up with foreign slang, and i imagine you experience the same, perhaps in hispanic areas? Thats some of it, very generalized but still, hope my broken english didn't come off too bad, alas i am working class, although a reading and thinking drone.
Language evolves - FACT.
The English that we use now is different to that used just a few decades ago, which in turn is different to that used by Shakespeare and if you go back as far as Chaucer the differences are huge.
English has been dumbed down continually for the past 600 years or so. The scholarly elite hate that fact but it is just the continued development of the language.
"Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren't distracted by the total lack of content in your writing." ;)
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." - HL Mencken
You read
I originally took Freshman Comp back in 1992. Recently, I went back and took a senior-level art history course. As part of the class we were divided in groups and given each other's papers to criticique. In my group, only three people actually wrote at a senior level. The rest of the papers would have received failing grades from my freshman English teachers. It's hard to give any constructive, truly useful advice if the paper is full of run-on sentences, has no logical transitions or structure, and is generally difficult to follow.
I don't care how informal someone's personal email or IM is. But high school and college kids need to be able to write well, and business and professional writing needs to be coherent. If we aren't teaching this, we are failing them.
This man is an idiot.
1) Comic books have nothing to do with his topic, really. They are typically written with the same grammar and spelling as anything else, and like most mediums, comics are what the writer puts in. There was some very serious and philosophical stories written in a graphic medium. In addition, they are a means to grab a reader's attention that might otherwise slip away; comics inspired, for example, my brother to start reading for pleasure as a child when he was otherwise uninterested.
2) Like the above hypothetical comic book author, writing informally is all about what the person wants to put into it. If there is a probably with decreased literacy levels in informal writing, I suspect it's a product of overall drop in individual standards and desire to put more effort into the work.
I grew up with a computer in my home of some type from when I was four years old on, starting in 1980. I played a great many games that had extensive text to read, games that taught me problem solving, that probably helped my hand eye coordination. Some of my early reading was helping my dad type in programs in BASIC from his computer magazines. When I got older, IRC chat rooms taught me to type faster. Obviously none of this has reduced my level of literacy and in some cases has helped it.
In the midst of a time where children are very interested in reading, due to the popularity of fantasy novels, why do we need to make excuses, rather than trying to fix the problem?
YA RLY!
Impotant Informartion from the ofice of t3h president
Mr G Bosh = Givein lesonz on teh use of teh american language on the stepz of the white hause toonight.
thasnk you for yor co-op-eration
My college roommate is now an English professor. I'll be danged if he hasn't shown me research papers turned in by COLLEGE FRESHMEN last year that use 'LOL' and 'OMG' in the actual paper. Not to mention papers that have NOT ONE CAPITALIZED LETTER in the whole thing. It was completely mind-numbing to me. Can you imagine turning in a 10-page paper in college that was written like one big IM conversation?
Han shot first.
You hit upon a key point there. Vocabulary, grammar and spelling are not improved significantly through writing; they are improved by reading well written works that challenge your current knowledge.
The larger your vocabulary, the more accurately you can describe the world. The better your grammar, the more likely you will be to keep your readers interested in the subject matter. The more accurate your spelling the less confusion you will sow among your readers.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I agree that technology is not to blame. Society is to blame. The education system has become a joke. Every day, less kids are motivated to learn. Every day, less kids are motivated to care. Every day, more kids are convinced that (a) nothing matters, (b) there is no right and wrong, and (c) everything should be handed to them.
It's nowhere near all of them. Yet. Speaking as someone who has been working with teenagers for 15+ years and as soemone who has been very involved in his childrens' education from their birth onward, the amazing thing is not how many kids have bad grammar and spelling skills; it's how many don't. Scary? Yes. Amazing? No.
I used computers and early networks when a 300 baud modem was a big deal. Believe me, I spent plenty of time using "computer shorthand" such as LOL, ROTFLMBO, "u" and so forth. In fact, as a geek kids, friends and I used similar conventions to write quick, small notes. Somehow we still learned proper spelling and grammar, because we were motivated. Our families, the schools, and society all helped motivate us. That occurs far, far less today.
I can spell just fine. I never learned to type, though. 8^(
I would like to see the figures that back up your claim that half of working age adults are not employed full time.
The person I am talking about had so many jobs and while not all were winners he had a few where he was getting paid very well and was a permanent employee when he got himself fired. He was not fired without reason, he would not do his job, he tell the boss he did not know what he was doing or he just plain missed so much work they could not count on him. Even a union he belonged to dropped him because he was not a good employee.....it is pretty bad when a union drops you.
As far a permanent employee goes, no one is guaranteed a job for life......not even in Japan anymore.
Program or Programme?
;)
Color or Colour?
Gray or Grey?
Secondly, which version of English are you working with? English US? Or English UK? Or maybe Kenya English. What if we are writing for an audience of Texans vs an audience of Candians.
The problem is that English is a virus language. It is mutable and extremely changable with a venacular that has more varients then there are languages in the world (most likely). Latin was easy because it had a specific set of rules and if you learn German, it is very easy to follow and it makes sense.
However, English is just bastard language and perhaps it is one of the reasons the UK and then later the US became the world powers that they did because of the ability to express ideas that are not currently in the language.
Could even a well knoweldged University professors in 1500's England find the words to describe the modern internet? Besides the word magic and devil majik and "Thine box permutes animated art! Prithy fair creature bless me with thine knowledge" and then get the reply "internet, lol!"
So we are faced with the problem: "What is proper English?" Well whatever is proper to you at the time and the majority who you live with I suppose. It won't be the same in 50 years that is for sure.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
When I first got online I was told that it was poor netiquette to pick up on others' spelling, typos, etc. I adhered to this, but I remember that not enforcing language standards like this horrified an older generation at the time.
In the short term that kind of flexibility was fine, but now it looks as if my grandparents had a point after all.
Ironically, today I see those on the bleeding edge of the internet rigidly adhering to computing standards. Even the broader community is aware of it. For instance, when Apple didn't follow RSS standards in iPhoto it made front page news on Slashdot!
I can probably spell 5,000 words of French correctly ... and I don't even speak French! Seriously, learning to spell 5,000 words isn't asking much. In fact, it's the equivalent of asking someone to read something once in a while.
Breakfast served all day!
By your reasoning, changing from hand-written to printing presses did nothing to literacy, literature, or language. I don't think anyone would agree with that.
The printing press, by changing the medium, allowed more accessibility for people to produce new works for larger audiences. In effect, while before it required a much larger ammount of capital to be "published" (i.e. being copied by many people), now someone relatively unknown could write something and have country-wide distribution. Newspapers became possible, since previously each newspaper would have to be handwritten.
With the internet, we again see changes due to the medium. While printing presses were relatively inexpensive, computers and internet access are not even a luxury item to people in the first-world. Blogging is the new newspaper -- accessible , about everyday events as they happen, different ones for different localities -- and we must expect language and communication to change as a result.
With respect to the quality of an individual literary work, the medium is meaningless, but the effect of technology on a culture's written record is a different question entirely as new genres are created and new paradigms formed.
PS. We're talking on a forum. Didn't exist before the internet/BBS.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I would like to see the figures that back up your claim that half of working age adults are not employed full time.
Bureau of Labor Statistics. Half of all working age adults are either:
1. Temps
2. Part-time
3. Unemployed
4. Out of the work force entirely (read: unemployed for so long they have no more unemployment)
This is entirely consistent with what most people in their 20s and 30s can observe on a daily basis. People constantly worried about layoffs. Constantly being laid off, fired, downsized, being asked to work extra for no extra pay, taking pay cuts, training their replacements, etc. If people get an interview they don't have the "necessary skills." If people can find a job, they can't keep it. If they can keep it, it doesn't pay enough.
Of the half that are employed in full-time, regular, permanent jobs, most aren't being paid well enough to support themselves, much less a family and a mortgage.
As far a permanent employee goes, no one is guaranteed a job for life
The bank is guaranteed mortgage payments for 30 years. The landlord is guaranteed rent first of every month. Unfair. Sorry.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I found this at this site you specified but I could find nothing that says half.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
You say you went to a university, what was your major? My sister went to college late in life...she never even really had a job and was hired on the spot soon after graduation and is working at the same place to this day. I have worked at various jobs since I was 14, sometimes two at once and never had a problem getting a job. Due to a back injury I have been out of the workforce for 5 years but I have been retrained in IT and now hold several certifications. If I was able to return to work today....I could have a job, today.
I have never been fired from any of my jobs. I have always quit to move on to other things.
People always argue those statistics. The reason they do is because it's really difficult to admit that business is fucking people over like that. But they are.
You say you went to a university
Only a claim, right? Sounds more and more like an interview. "So, you claim to have a degree..." and once I prove it they say "well, degrees aren't worth what they used to be worth..." and on it goes until they say "I'm very sorry but you're not qualified to paste bullshit into Powerpoint presentations." And resume #873 gets reverse-vaccuumed into the shitpipe.
sometimes two at once and never had a problem getting a job.
Must be nice to automatically get hired whenever you want. What would be better is if people had no problem keeping a job. My parents average length of employment was well over 20 years. Mine is just under 12 months.
My parents and grandparents all combined were laid off precisely once. I have been laid off, "downsized" or outright fired (usually with the rest of my group/team/division) ten times.
My generation is being fucked over on a scale that is beyond belief. It's wrong.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
> In a language, there are easy things to wrote, like small words and nontechnical dissertations. ... ]
:-)
[
> But if you find someone who's unable to use the correct tense in a sentence, can't spell a phrase such as, "no one", and cannot use the correct homonym, then you shouldn't be coddling them and saying, "it's alright."
It's alright
People always argue those statistics. The reason they do is because it's really difficult to admit that business is fucking people over like that. But they are.
I am sure some do but I don't see them all doing it.
Only a claim, right? Sounds more and more like an interview. "So, you claim to have a degree..." and once I prove it they say "well, degrees aren't worth what they used to be worth..." and on it goes until they say "I'm very sorry but you're not qualified to paste bullshit into Powerpoint presentations." And resume #873 gets reverse-vaccuumed into the shitpipe.
Not at all and not my point. Having a degree is a very good thing, most of the time. If your degree is in Philosophy it will probably not help you in the business world. A degree could make you overqualified for some jobs but all in all a degree is a great thing to have.
Must be nice to automatically get hired whenever you want. What would be better is if people had no problem keeping a job. My parents average length of employment was well over 20 years. Mine is just under 12 months.
Yes it is, I have had to turn jobs because I was wanted by several business at the same time. I seem to get bored with a job in the 5 to 7 year time frame and I move on. I have always been a person who was requested because I treat my customers well. In one job I had more customers than probably anyone else....period. It tool 3 people to replace me when I left.
My parents and grandparents all combined were laid off precisely once. I have been laid off, "downsized" or outright fired (usually with the rest of my group/team/division) ten times. My generation is being fucked over on a scale that is beyond belief. It's wrong.
Both my parents have had many jobs over the years. We had good times, we had lean times but I never went hungry. I don't know what you really expect. No one owes you anything. Maybe you were part of that "every thing is owed to me" type of teaching I was talking about. Maybe you have proved my original point or maybe you are in the wrong business.
Hell I have even taken jobs just for fun! Trust me I am a very Type B kind of person. I would call myself lazy in fact. When I am at work I find the easiest way to do the job as best I can and I always seem to succeed. Some would say I am lucky but I am the most unluckiest person on the planet or at least it feels that way some times. Not being able to work the last 5 years has been the worst thing in my life. I am used to being able to buy what I wanted, when I wanted. That is no longer the case. I have to count every penny. You may feel life is treating you badly but it could be much, much worse. I would trade places with you in a second.
If your degree is in Philosophy it will probably not help you in the business world.
Just made my point. Why wouldn't a degree in Philosophy help in the business world? Does business exist in some kind of alternate dimension where philosophy doesn't? Someone who completed a degree in Philosophy is probably brilliantly intelligent and someone who can analyze business problems from a variety of perspectives. They are probably also above-average writers and problem-solvers.
But it's not on the list of buzzword-majors so it doesn't count. Might as well have spent the tuition money on a cruise. Another education actively wasted by business on purpose.
I don't know what you really expect. No one owes you anything.
Fine. Then society shouldn't lie to people. I expect a career around which I can build a home and a family. That's what my parents and grandparents worked so hard for. They weren't cheated out of their hard work. My generation is the FIRST IN HISTORY that will do WORSE than the previous one.
Maybe you were part of that "every thing is owed to me" type of teaching I was talking about.
The teaching was rather simple: Go to school. Work hard. Get a good job. You'll succeed.
I did the first three, and I did them well. The fourth was a lie. If I succeed it will not be because I "got a good job." It will be because I did twice the work.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Just made my point. Why wouldn't a degree in Philosophy help in the business world? Does business exist in some kind of alternate dimension where philosophy doesn't? Someone who completed a degree in Philosophy is probably brilliantly intelligent and someone who can analyze business problems from a variety of perspectives. They are probably also above-average writers and problem-solvers.
But it's not on the list of buzzword-majors so it doesn't count. Might as well have spent the tuition money on a cruise. Another education actively wasted by business on purpose.
Well if I was hiring someone for a business I would give the nod to the business major. If your major was in philosophy and you want a job in big business then you are not as smart as you think you are. While I think education is very important it does not mean that you are a mensa member when you graduate. If my major was dead languages I would not expect to be a manager in a fortune 500 company.
Fine. Then society shouldn't lie to people. I expect a career around which I can build a home and a family. That's what my parents and grandparents worked so hard for. They weren't cheated out of their hard work. My generation is the FIRST IN HISTORY that will do WORSE than the previous one.
Your parents and grandparents worked hard so you would not have to....we will probably never work as hard as they did. My grandparents were borderline poor but they were very happy. I have done much better than my grandparents. Do I think business is always fair....no way! Is life always fair....nope.
The teaching was rather simple: Go to school. Work hard. Get a good job. You'll succeed.
I did the first three, and I did them well. The fourth was a lie. If I succeed it will not be because I "got a good job." It will be because I did twice the work.
Pretty much everyone I know that has followed that advice has succeeded but as with life it will always be in varying degrees. Sometimes it does take twice the work and I have done that. When I became injured there was only one business that let me down. The Government! I paid into social security for just this reason but I was turned down. I had medical proof and several surgeries behind me and I was turned down. Other people that I know were given it without the need for proof or wanting to get better. Most of the people in the local SS office if they were citizens had only been citizens for a year or two. When I saw the judge I was the only English speaking person on the docket that morning. I paid money into the account so if I became unable to work it would help me out. Business with their insurance programs saved me.
Well if I was hiring someone for a business I would give the nod to the business major.
Anything but that philosophy guy, right? Another education wasted.
If your major was in philosophy and you want a job in big business then you are not as smart as you think you are.
Absolutely incredible. Big business is so much smarter than everyone else, isn't it? Hiring managers can sit there and proclaim someone to have a lack of intellect based solely on the major they dedicated their education to. Absolutely incredible. And people actually have to ask why half the working-age adults are not employed full-time.
While I think education is very important it does not mean that you are a mensa member when you graduate.
The more businesses have that attitude the more education will suffer. The literacy rate will continue to drop and society will suffer as a result. People have no reason to go to college if the social contract is ignored.
Your parents and grandparents worked hard so you would not have to...
And they failed, just like I have. All of their efforts along with all of mine have been destroyed by office politics and greed.
Do I think business is always fair....no way! Is life always fair....nope.
Maybe this should be taught to people before they shovel their money into a worthless education.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Anything but that philosophy guy, right? Another education wasted.
Well yes if you expecting to go to the top of the business world with a philosophy degree. I would probably not fire a nuclear physicist for a business either. Unless I was looking for either a philosopher or a nuclear physicist. Common Sense.
Absolutely incredible. Big business is so much smarter than everyone else, isn't it? Hiring managers can sit there and proclaim someone to have a lack of intellect based solely on the major they dedicated their education to. Absolutely incredible. And people actually have to ask why half the working-age adults are not employed full-time.
I never said that either. Big business does not mean they are mensa members either. Again it comes back to education and common sense. If you spent most of your time in school studying the snowfall in the Andes you might not be as qualified as a business major. Common Sense.
The more businesses have that attitude the more education will suffer. The literacy rate will continue to drop and society will suffer as a result. People have no reason to go to college if the social contract is ignored.
No it will not. Again I think this goes back to the education system. People are told do want you want you are a special person. Well that is not true. You can't always do what you want and be successful.....it sucks but that is the way it is right now...planetwide. Gotta feel bad for those people in Russia were even the mobsters are all college grads. They actually had a socialist contract but it did them little good. Of course under it they could not complain if they wanted to live but at least now that can bitch about it. The literacy rate will continue to drop but not for the reasons you mentioned. They will drop because teachers get tenure with two years of work. It is hard to remove a tenured teacher. Hell even if the teacher is sleeping with the students they have to think very hard at what action to take against the teacher. Often they do what is called "dumping the trash". The let the teacher go but give him or her a glowing review so that they are hired by another school. Never mind the fact they are a child molester.
And they failed, just like I have. All of their efforts along with all of mine have been destroyed by office politics and greed.
They owned their own home...not a great one but they owned it, they ate, they were happy. They may have been poor by our standards but they were not by theirs. They succeeded better than Donald Trump. They were raised in one of the poorest states in the south and worked hard for next to nothing for a large part of their lives. When they moved to California it was like the land of milk and honey. No grapes of wrath for them.
Maybe this should be taught to people before they shovel their money into a worthless education.
This is what I have been saying. In life their are winners and losers. Having games were no one is keeping score sounds all warm and fuzzy and is not wrong to do but it does not prepare the children for a life were they are expected to win. That may hurt your view of the world but it is that way the world over. Even the tribal chief in Africa has more cows that the lowest of the tribe. It was that way with the American Indians as well. True they had a lot more things right than we do but they had winners and losers. One thing they did do was impart to their children a view of the world as it was. Greed was there as well. If another tribe had more or tried to take from their tribe they went to war and protected or took what they needed.
Maybe that is why I have done well at the jobs I have done. I was great to the customers even if I did not like them. I did what was expected of me with complaint....well few complaints. I did what I did very well. One thing I did insist on that work was work and home was home. I had some bosses that wanted to blur the two. Make the business intruded into the ho
A really good rebuttal on this has come from Aaron Duran of Geek in the City.m .php
http://www.geekinthecity.com/rants/a_rebuttal_fro