A rant on spelling, grammar, syntax, and other such oddities

Upon reading the title of this blog, you may become disheartened and scrabbling around looking for something else to do, but bear with me. Now it always strikes me as odd that none of my English teachers are actually good at spelling. Spelling is a cornerstone of a language, particularly English, isn’t it? Apparently it isn’t. It seems that these days, the purpose of a language is not to make sense or be correct, but merely to communicate an idea. Isn’t this what languages have always done? Yes and no. Go back to the Middle Ages, few people could read, and language was as much a symbol of prowess and importance as it was useful for communicating. These days, it is essentially the opposite.

This post has reasonably good spelling, grammar, syntax etc. However most of my posts do not look anything like this. Yet the other posts are still completely understandable (I hope). Society no longer needs complex systems in place to make sense of text. We are brought up with various forms of slang, and we can cope with it. Taking to further extremes, the abbreviated language spoken in SMS, and to a lesser extent, IM, is arguably not the same language. You need to understand English to understand this language, but it has become so abbreviated that the outsider would be clueless. Here, the function of the language (communicating as quickly and efficiently as possible) has been emphasised over everything else. This means that text messages can be much shorter, which is no bad thing.

This is a good evolution of language. I’m not endorsing it for widespread use, as there is still a place for neat, correct language, but in its own niche, it is excellent. An interesting occurrence is the cultivation of language when it crosses mediums. Applying SMS language to IM, where the conditions are different, creates a different language. The user has a big screen, highly readable text, a fast input device (keyboard), and more time. The brief language of SMS quickly becomes embellished and modified to be more visually pleasing, and amusing. The language is used in a conversational context, which also changes it. SMS and English merge together, making a hybrid format with which we are now familiar.

This seems to be a suitable place to end this post, even though I have not covered all that I set out to do. The rant provides an opportunity to peruse a topic in as much detail as you wish, and then continue where you left off the next time. Here I go again, ranting about ranting. Anyway, I would like to hear your opinion on this matter. Post a comment, or pingback to this, and give your own personal rant.