It’s even in the
Cambridge Dictionary .
I did write a few words in reply last night (quite a few, actually :rolleyes: ) and forgot about the 15 min. rule where the forum bumps you off if you’re taking too long over your post. Lost the lot!
I was saying how concerned I am about foreigners struggling to learn our language when the goalposts keep moving. And how do they manage when trying to read something written by a native English speaker that’s full of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes? This is an important aspect now that we communicate so frequently with people from other countries, especially in business matters. You just have to look on the Internet at the way people write on there now. Many don’t use punctuation marks, capital letters and I won’t even mention the spelling. My point is that writing in this haphazard way can end up with misleading information being passed on, occasionally with serious consequences, because the whole meaning of a sentence or paragraph can totally change, purely due to such errors and omissions. I’ve seen paragraphs written from beginning to end without one single punctuation mark or capital letter, so it reads as one very long sentence. The reader is free to choose where one sentence ends and another one starts and what meaning can be attached to that misspelt word, but will the meaning still be the same as was originally intended by the author?
These days, if you discuss or criticise anyone’s spelling or grammar, you’re told to ‘Get a life’. I find myself, on many occasions, struggling to understand what message someone is trying to convey and it takes up a fair bit of time. I would agree that it’s fun using text speke for the purpose it’s intended and it’s sensible to do so considering the circumstances. And the latest buzz words do add a bit of a zing to conversations with young people. My problem is when these folks can no longer make the transition back to proper written and spoken English when necessary and, in the future, when they are out and about in the world, they may not always be able to make themselves understood clearly. To me, it’s not a case of people’s command of the language showing which class they come from, but merely the concern that youngsters coming up behind us will no longer be able to string a comprehensible sentence together. Perhaps their peers will understand them, but the rest of us will be left out of it, unless we, too, are given the gift of being able to decipher what it is that’s been written and translate it correctly, adding basic punctuation in the right places, as we go.
The evolution of language has been going on gradually over centuries, but what we’re seeing today isn’t evolution, it’s corruption. It follows no rules that can be taught and passed on because it’s made up of a jumble of misspelt and misused words created by individual people, in their own individual way, who really have no idea which is the correct way to spell them. I don’t know whether future society will be able to just accept that there will be umpteen different ways to spell the same word and that punctuation is a thing of the past and is no longer necessary. We all make spelling and grammatical errors at times and that’s fine, but it’s when people don’t care any more that makes me sad and very concerned. It’s a bit shaming when foreigners can speak and write our own language better than we can. I wonder what they must think of us.
Is it just my age?
