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It's OK to keep AIMing
fooby12 writes "According to the Univeristy of Toronto instant messaging does not hurt the grammar of the people who use it. From the article: "With 80% of Canadian teenagers using instant messaging and adopting its unique linguistic shorthand, many teachers and parents are concerned about the medium's potential to corrupt kids' grammar. But instant messaging doesn't deserve its bad reputation as a spoiler of syntax, suggests a new study from the University of Toronto.""
What changes when people write on Messenger is mainly spelling. Spelling is part of the lexicon, and the lexicon is not "grammar". Grammar consists of phonology, morphology, and syntax, and I've never seen any of those parts of the English language being butchered by netspeak.
Is much worse for spelling than instant messaging ever was. If I spell a word wrong and it gets fixed then I never know I spelled it wrong. I doubt there are many people out there who think they are typing correcting when really they are using net speak.
Dooom
But my brain is 'asploding' from the posts so far in this thread with their 'lolz' and their 'plz' and their 'orly'. Get off my lawn, yada yada.
From a business perspective, I've seen college graduates emailing using the typical IM abbreviations -- but typically, when reminded that it's not appropriate, I'd say that the grammar of these new hires tends to be as good or better than some of what I see elsewhere. At least they've been communicating in a non-verbal format.
If anything, I find that those who have IM'd a lot tend to have an easier time of getting their message across clearly in emails -- maybe it's due to their understanding of the shortfalls of text communication.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The attribution of that quotation to Churchill is apocryphal. Furthermore, Churchill had no training in linguistics. If he did, he would have known that English has been placing prepositions at the end of sentences for centuries, for they are no longer strict prepositions but really coverbs much as like in, say, Hungarian. Also, it is the point of linguistics to be descriptive (explaining what's heard on the street without judgement), not prescriptive (telling people how to speak). You should really pick up Trudgill & Bauer's Language Myths (New York: Penguin, 1999) and you'll see just how naive your comment was.
BAD headline! BAD!
NOT AIM!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Cursive isn't really a necessity, just another preference of some people. The idea that cursive is more or less elegant is simply a passing fad. As for hand-writing versus typing, of course typing is much faster. It's sensible to do so, and is reasonable to type rather than write in many cases. The only reason people get in a tizzy over things like this is that they believe their language should be "pure". In reality, the only pure languages are dead languages. Any evolving language is subject to large tranformations, and just because the previous generation of linguists or literature majors doesn't agree with something doesn't mean it is wrong. After all, english is quite a different language today than it once was. Who's to say it will even be recognizable in years to come as such?
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
People used to write telegrams in short, incomplete sentences in order to save money on the transmission by reducing the length of the message, and as far as I know it didn't hurt anybody's grammar.
I never thought the grammar and spelling quality of the 'average' person was declining due to AIM'ng, SMS, etc. What I have belived is that the smart people are already on the 'net. In a pervese variation of Metcalf's Law, each new person that gets on is much more likely to be an idiot that detracts from the 'net than benefit it. With nearly every US teenager on, everybody gets to see what mass produced education has done to your mass produced USA 'citizen.' It's not that the average product of the US public education system's skills declined, they just always sucked. Nobody knew it because those poor at writing either hid it well or stayed away from situations that required it.
Fortunately we have the Internet with places like slashdot, where everybody's bad grammar and spelling can shine.
(And when I starting talking in l33t3, just do what a guy I knew does: go to the mall. Being around all the Valley-speak tends to normalize the speech centers somewhat.)
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."