Necessity, Convenience or Just Plain Ignorance?
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The “curmudgeon” has entered the building! “Snowflakes” should find the exit
A few years ago, not too long after the fateful day when character limits were imposed on messaging by Twitter, I began to observe what seemed like a steep decline in the grammatical proficiency of English-language users. Punctuation appeared to have gone the way of the dodo; it was regularly ignored in online discourse by the shameless “illiterati” and various other uncaring “dodos.” The apostrophe had all but disappeared and the comma was endangered. I cringed every time I saw “ur” presented as the condensed form of “u-r,” meaning “you are” and, by contraction, “you’re.” This was before I recognized that it wasn’t in fact a nod to Robert E. Howard’s Conan mythology (I’m joking here, even if the absence of the “capital U” wasn’t a dead giveaway, but I trust you’ll catch my sarcastic drift). Then there was the mind-boggling substitution of “teh” for “the,” apparently the consequence of a video-game typo that soon became part of the fan-boy lingua franca and was eventually enlisted in everyday speech by those who certainly know better and obviously thought they were being daring or socially au courant. The disemboweling of “you’re” to yield the irrational “your” as a stand-in for “you are” even made its way into publications, tolerated by copy editors who were careless, clueless or merely the youthful, inexperienced spawn of their social milieu. I have yet to see “were” as a replacement for “we are” and “we’re” in anything other than the most inane of social-media exchanges, but no bridge is too far and it may just be a matter of time.
In other news, dropping the apostrophe can dramatically alter the meaning of a word, turning it into something else entirely and really muddying the water: “won’t” becomes “wont” (custom or habit); “can’t” becomes “cant” (tilted to one side); “we’re” becomes “were” (meaning “formerly”) . But I strongly suspect the first two are not terms the average person will use anyway (or will even know that they exist; be honest now, did you?), so there may actually be little chance for misuse unless “worlds collide.” Call me a stuffy intellectual throwback (please, not an elitist), but I love precise language and hate to see it degraded through casual disregard for precedent, even if such sloppiness has become “common usage” that the compilers of modern dictionaries stoop to include in their tomes. I’m wondering whether this travesty is being taught as “normal” in our public elementary schools, or at least allowed to flourish, by teachers who don’t know any better or who feel culturally compelled to “toe the line;” it is certainly reinforced in peer groups. I’ve often thought “Idiocracy, here we come!”
Then I experienced an epiphany, a plausible insight that would explain many of theses instances (although a case can always be made for “simple ignorance”). Having only 140 characters to work with made it imperative to sacrifice something to the implacable gods of brevity and economy. In this one special case, most punctuation had to go, and other superfluous editorial niceties, condemned as space-hogging placeholders, weren’t far behind. Ease and immediacy of communication were paramount; the twin goals of fullness and clarity of expression were gutted on the altar of necessity, and some crippled linguistic constructs erred on the side of incomprehensibility. The sad thing is that these forced economies of style have outgrown their social-media origins and have spilled over into general written practice, where it’s not unusual to see them in emails and other posts where no such length restrictions apply. The persistent substitution of “your” for “you’re” is at least decipherable when taken in context (although I still feel an involuntary shudder when I encounter it in anything other than social-media text), but the abomination “ur” is a more troubling matter. Although I must acknowledge succumbing to the occasional reliance on the plural pronouns “they,” “them” and “their” when speaking in the singular, you may have noticed that I do my damnedest to “write my way around” this difficulty; their miscast appearance in my sentences is rare and I don’t just roll over and welcome every opportunity to misapply them. Autocorrect may still defeat me if I’m not paying close attention, but you typically won’t catch me writing “there” when “their” is demanded by common sense; that’s just ignorance, plain and simple. Such is not my wont, you see. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist that!)
As a former technical and legal writer I had little “wiggle room” in my work for such unabashed colloquialisms, although I did constantly pursue a conversational approach in my prose. While expounding on the tarot is nowhere near as exacting, after five years of doing it I still can’t back way from my training and experience to the point that I find it acceptable to be so grammatically puerile even though my internet-inured readers won’t bat an eye if I do. Still, I have come a long way from the time someone ran a writing analysis program on one of my memos and concluded that it would take eighteen years of education to understand it. Maybe I’ll just wait; the long-extinct dodos could eventually return to “claim their own” and this unfortunate trend will join them in obscurity, but I’m not holding my breath. The unsettling specter I’m haunted by is the tempting “path of least resistance” taken by those uncritical “socionauts” (navigators of social cyberspace and other socio-psychological spheres) who have little exposure to the formulation of complex metaphysical thought and no time or inclination to ponder the merits of comprehensive exposition (they seek small, easily-digested bites of information, not a cornucopia of ideas). The British might well consider their YouTube-fueled insouciance (think “intellectual fast food”) to be “bad form,” but I’m more taken with the ranting of John Cleese about “blinkered, Philistine pig-ignorance” in the Monty Python “Architect” sketch. (On second thought that may be too harsh an assessment, but there it is.)
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on September 12, 2022.
