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How Technology Is Shaping Language
An anonymous reader writes "This is an interesting article about how technology is shaping the English language, which touches on the fate of the current crop of (sometimes silly) tech-inspired words, and anticipates an increased blurring of the line between the written and spoken word. Professor David Crystal, honorary professor at the School of Linguistics and English Studies at the University of Bangor, says, 'This kind of ludicity [linguistic playfulness] is very attractive for a while. People keep it going and then it sort of falls out of use. Exactly how long it will go on for is unclear but it's like any game, any novelty, any linguistic novelty — I can't see it lasting. If you look back 10 years ago to the kind of clever-clever things that were going on in the 1990s — MUDs and MOOs — all the early game strategies and lots of very interesting language features coming up as people tried to develop a style of language that would suit the technology. Well, that technology's history now and the language has gone with it.'"
f1r5t p05t
i alwys thot tht tech had a negggative impakt on engrish... silly mee :) lolzorz
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
It would have been nice to include a little deeper history in this article, like maybe talking about the Jargon File, the dictionary for old school hackers that's filled with fascinating history about the technology and innovations behind some of the terms we still use online today.
Or would that detract from the idea that cultural-shifts resulting in lexical shifts is some kind of totally new and unexpected phenomenon?
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
I named my last kid Kevin8992 so he could get his actual name on his email.
I dispute his claim that the terms are even English. They're slanguage* at best and more often mere craft jargon. To qualify as "English", it has to have sustained use, a definable meaning and exist outside limited subcultures. (Or it has to appear in the Oxford English Dictionary. I'll accept that.)
MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) is technically the name of a specific game engine, although it can also refer to any game engine of a similar ilk. It is a technical term. The same is true of MOOs, although actually only one gaming engine ever existed as far as I know (LambdaMOO).
*Slanguage: Something that is more complete and concrete than slang but which cannot be defined as a language in its own right.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Technology isn't just adding new terms to the language, it's also changing, and in some cases erasing, idioms that already exist. Take for example the phrase, "you sound like a broken record". How many people under the age of 25 even know what a broken record sounds like? As time goes on I expect that phrase to become increasingly rare, and to be replaced by a similar phrase, thus completing the circle of life :P
I think language is more arbitrary and unpredictable than that.
We still 'dial' a number, and our phones still 'ring', even though the actual dials and bells haven't been around for a generation. We still drop someone a line, even though operated-assisted calling hasn't been necessary for longer than this old grey-hair has been alive. We still go full steam ahead even though ships haven't burned coal for over a century. And people are still POSH centuries after 'Port Outward, Starboard Home' lost its original meaning.
Some phrases do drop out of currency, but others, for reasons too complex to fathom, seem to endure for centuries. Envy, for example, has been 'green' since Elizabethan times. Beautiful women have been compared to the sun since the Italian Renaissance. And ass-kissing has been around since Chaucer's time.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.