A ramble about grammar, spelling and sociolinguistics
Before you begin reading this, I have to admit that I am certainly not an expert on grammar. I just find the topic interesting and had fun putting together this entry.
This entry is the result of a little tangent domino effect. There was nothing on at the movie theatre that my mum and I hadn't already seen apart from movies we didn't care to pay for. We looked at what was on TV, and I Heart Huckabees happened to be playing. I'd been meaning to rent this movie for a while and so we watched it. Basically it's a comedy with a look at philosophy, questioning social norms.
After the movie, I went upstairs and looked through my philosophy books and I found a little one about Nietzsche which I'd been meaning to read. I read for a while and got to a bit which noted Nietzsche's suggestion that all language is inevitably metaphorical. This reminded me of a few conversations I'd recently had regarding grammar and usage. The gist of the conversations was that 'proper grammar' is falling by the wayside, with talk of what that means for our society. Is it merely the evolution of our language, or is it a backslide in to a more blunt form of communication, eventually unraveling to grunts and hand gestures?
Of course I immediately went to my good ol' pal the internet. Intornet. Interweb. First, I searched the BBC for articles on grammar and the first thing I found was this BBC audio feature on 'correct' English. This helped to give me a bit of perspective, as it is a fairly unbiased look at the evolution and usage of the English language, including a look at the propriety of certain sociolects in varying situations.
This got me thinking about standardization. As Wikipedia says, there is no governing body for the English language as there are for other languages such as Dutch, French and Spanish. However, we do have standard texts to maintain the stability of the language - The Oxford English Dictionary likely being the most extensively known and used. However, dictionaries are updated when the common usage of a word is changed or new when new words are created.
English is the most widely used second language, therefore it is natural that depending on the location in which it is being used, it will be spoken and written with varying affectations. I think that this is born from a need for clarity when a person is thinking in their first language yet speaking in their second (English in this case), or from other social factors.
This brought me back to sociolects. Are they merely a costume to present yourself in, identifying yourself as a part of a group? I know that I use different sociolects depending on the situation. For example, when I am speaking to another massage therapist and naming body parts, I use different terms than when I'm with my friends and family. I don't talk to a potential employer in the same way that I would speak to my nephew. I am presenting myself as a certain person by the words I choose and the tone in which I speak. I find myself wondering if this is the right way to go about things - should I have to change things about myself in order to conform to the expectations of others? Is it that I feel that I have to, or do I just enjoy the variety? To me, it feels like wearing different styles of clothing. I like to dress up, but I also enjoy wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Does this mean that I like to conform to certain social expectations, or again does it just indicate that I like variety? Sorry, I'm getting off on a tangent.
While reading through some readers' comments on the BBC website, I've come across the theory that mass media (music videos, Hollywood fluff movies, shortened chat room grammar, text messaging) encouragement and large class sizes are both contributing factors to poor spelling and grammar, and that this is intentional - it helps to produce uninformed people who will then do all of the jobs that the 'higher classes' do not want to do. To balance this out, I must note that other readers pointed out that the participation (or lack thereof) of the parents in the education of their children plays a big role, but they also said that the parents are often quite poorly educated themselves - garbage in, garbage out.
I also have to say that instead of conspiracy, it is likely that the media are simply influenced by the way that people are communicating. People created chat room abbreviations on their own, and this has itself developed into a widely accepted form of language. Most people understand "LOL", "ROTFL", "BRB", "OMFG" and "IMHO".
As a side note to this, I have to mention the Plain English Campaign, which is not specifically about internet-speak, but addresses the issue of jargon used in documents which are supposed to be accessible to the public, but are incomprehensible to laypeople.
The use of grammar as a way to identify ones' self as an educated person has actually backfired in some ways - there are many people who attempt to bring themselves into the higher regard of others by using words which sound impressive, but which are either used redundantly or simply thrown in even though the speaker doesn't know what the words mean. This can end in embarrassment for the speaker, but sometimes this just ends up causing the language to evolve in a different way.
A good example of this is the word nonplussed. Originally it meant "past the point of coping, at a loss, perplexed". Nowadays it is often used to mean "unconcerned, unaffected" - the opposite of its original meaning. There are many words for which the meaning has evolved over time - that is the nature of the beast. Perhaps more attention is drawn to the evolution of English since there are more people speaking it, it is changing more quickly, and we have much quicker methods of communication - all of which are interconnected.
So, for those who are sticklers for grammar, spelling and pronunciation (I admit that I am guilty of harping on people about these things) - are we clinging to the standards because we are afraid of change, un-adaptable, needing to conform and force order? Or are we merely trying to maintain clarity in communication? My guess is that most of us are somewhere in the middle of the two. There is a need for a basic understanding of Standard English in order to understand any information one might wish to absorb in this language - but even so, we understand Elvis when he says "all this aggravation ain't satisfactionin' me."
**UPDATE** I just spoke with Margaret Atwood after a reading she gave, and I asked for her opinion on what is happening with grammar these days, and I mentioned the lack of structure in text messaging and internet chat. She replied that text messages are symbols for meaning, in the same way that Standard English is, and so the message is still the same. She also noted that the increase in text messaging and use of the internet has precipitated an increase in literacy, as people need to know how to read in order to access most information on the internet, and in order to communicate in some way via text message. I told her that I have come to a similar conclusion myself.
This entry is the result of a little tangent domino effect. There was nothing on at the movie theatre that my mum and I hadn't already seen apart from movies we didn't care to pay for. We looked at what was on TV, and I Heart Huckabees happened to be playing. I'd been meaning to rent this movie for a while and so we watched it. Basically it's a comedy with a look at philosophy, questioning social norms.
After the movie, I went upstairs and looked through my philosophy books and I found a little one about Nietzsche which I'd been meaning to read. I read for a while and got to a bit which noted Nietzsche's suggestion that all language is inevitably metaphorical. This reminded me of a few conversations I'd recently had regarding grammar and usage. The gist of the conversations was that 'proper grammar' is falling by the wayside, with talk of what that means for our society. Is it merely the evolution of our language, or is it a backslide in to a more blunt form of communication, eventually unraveling to grunts and hand gestures?
Of course I immediately went to my good ol' pal the internet. Intornet. Interweb. First, I searched the BBC for articles on grammar and the first thing I found was this BBC audio feature on 'correct' English. This helped to give me a bit of perspective, as it is a fairly unbiased look at the evolution and usage of the English language, including a look at the propriety of certain sociolects in varying situations.
This got me thinking about standardization. As Wikipedia says, there is no governing body for the English language as there are for other languages such as Dutch, French and Spanish. However, we do have standard texts to maintain the stability of the language - The Oxford English Dictionary likely being the most extensively known and used. However, dictionaries are updated when the common usage of a word is changed or new when new words are created.
English is the most widely used second language, therefore it is natural that depending on the location in which it is being used, it will be spoken and written with varying affectations. I think that this is born from a need for clarity when a person is thinking in their first language yet speaking in their second (English in this case), or from other social factors.
This brought me back to sociolects. Are they merely a costume to present yourself in, identifying yourself as a part of a group? I know that I use different sociolects depending on the situation. For example, when I am speaking to another massage therapist and naming body parts, I use different terms than when I'm with my friends and family. I don't talk to a potential employer in the same way that I would speak to my nephew. I am presenting myself as a certain person by the words I choose and the tone in which I speak. I find myself wondering if this is the right way to go about things - should I have to change things about myself in order to conform to the expectations of others? Is it that I feel that I have to, or do I just enjoy the variety? To me, it feels like wearing different styles of clothing. I like to dress up, but I also enjoy wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Does this mean that I like to conform to certain social expectations, or again does it just indicate that I like variety? Sorry, I'm getting off on a tangent.
While reading through some readers' comments on the BBC website, I've come across the theory that mass media (music videos, Hollywood fluff movies, shortened chat room grammar, text messaging) encouragement and large class sizes are both contributing factors to poor spelling and grammar, and that this is intentional - it helps to produce uninformed people who will then do all of the jobs that the 'higher classes' do not want to do. To balance this out, I must note that other readers pointed out that the participation (or lack thereof) of the parents in the education of their children plays a big role, but they also said that the parents are often quite poorly educated themselves - garbage in, garbage out.
I also have to say that instead of conspiracy, it is likely that the media are simply influenced by the way that people are communicating. People created chat room abbreviations on their own, and this has itself developed into a widely accepted form of language. Most people understand "LOL", "ROTFL", "BRB", "OMFG" and "IMHO".
As a side note to this, I have to mention the Plain English Campaign, which is not specifically about internet-speak, but addresses the issue of jargon used in documents which are supposed to be accessible to the public, but are incomprehensible to laypeople.
The use of grammar as a way to identify ones' self as an educated person has actually backfired in some ways - there are many people who attempt to bring themselves into the higher regard of others by using words which sound impressive, but which are either used redundantly or simply thrown in even though the speaker doesn't know what the words mean. This can end in embarrassment for the speaker, but sometimes this just ends up causing the language to evolve in a different way.
A good example of this is the word nonplussed. Originally it meant "past the point of coping, at a loss, perplexed". Nowadays it is often used to mean "unconcerned, unaffected" - the opposite of its original meaning. There are many words for which the meaning has evolved over time - that is the nature of the beast. Perhaps more attention is drawn to the evolution of English since there are more people speaking it, it is changing more quickly, and we have much quicker methods of communication - all of which are interconnected.
So, for those who are sticklers for grammar, spelling and pronunciation (I admit that I am guilty of harping on people about these things) - are we clinging to the standards because we are afraid of change, un-adaptable, needing to conform and force order? Or are we merely trying to maintain clarity in communication? My guess is that most of us are somewhere in the middle of the two. There is a need for a basic understanding of Standard English in order to understand any information one might wish to absorb in this language - but even so, we understand Elvis when he says "all this aggravation ain't satisfactionin' me."
**UPDATE** I just spoke with Margaret Atwood after a reading she gave, and I asked for her opinion on what is happening with grammar these days, and I mentioned the lack of structure in text messaging and internet chat. She replied that text messages are symbols for meaning, in the same way that Standard English is, and so the message is still the same. She also noted that the increase in text messaging and use of the internet has precipitated an increase in literacy, as people need to know how to read in order to access most information on the internet, and in order to communicate in some way via text message. I told her that I have come to a similar conclusion myself.