Language Evolve?

Oh... my... god. You're so right!

This way of writing I find repulsive, minimizing, abase, abject, dank, horrifying, disgusting, degrading, non-communicative, faddish, incoherent, inconsistent, offensive, lazy, disrespectful, uneducated, lowest-common-denominator, annoying, imprudent, embarrassing and destructive. Other than that, it's just fine.

If this kind of #&@% represents the direction any portion of our language is evolving towards, we might as well go back to clicks, grunts and yelps - at least then we'd have hope for the future.

*takes a sedative*

We're very lazy people, but also very innovative to adapt to our laziness. If the english language had smaller words or was already in short forms would you have this opinion now?

Maybe, who knows.

It's just how I feel about it

Currently, according a PEW report, most young people are aware of the difference between proper writing and texting/internet chatting:
"Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them."
Pew Internet: Writing, Technology and Teens

However, this distinction will be valid only as long as educators enforce the use of standard or formal English and continue to teach its rules. I remember reading recently several newspaper (from Great Britain, of all places) reports that some university academics were arguing that something likewenty grammatical/spelling errors were so common amongst their students, that it was a waste of their time to mark these on their papers or to lower the grade accordingly.

It does seem that there is a growing tendency to extend political democracy into intellectual matters; our education, for example, must always be relevant and "hold the student's interest" (translation, must be amusing and entertaining), and we must allow them to express themselves naturally. Diagramming sentences and memorising spelling and grammatical rules (when to use its and when to use it's, there/their were examples in the news articles I mentioned) is neither fun nor relevant to teen's daily life.
At least in the US, we constantly hear (or is it here?) from both college teachers and from business leaders that high school graduates are unable to communicate when they write. Both sectors have had to provide remedial training to freshmen and new-hires.
If our educational institutions will not, or cannot, teach standard English, we can surely expect its decline and transformation. And with the decline in English, it follows we can expect a disastrous decline in thinking.

Actually, I'd like to expand on this to help clarify. I think it might also help spur more debate on the evolution of language. I'm referring to TickTockMan's excellent post on the popularity of txtspeak (his post is here).

BASIS:[INDENT]I think it's a given that wherever any task can be accomplished by humans more easily, and they can get away with it, they'll do so. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing per say, but I believe it often has negative effects that we must must be aware of in order to accurately evaluate the new behavior. "Abbreviating" the tasks in our life can be a positive thing and surely has benefits, but there are certainly those which, when abbreviated, diminishes our experience by the substance that is lost. I believe this is the case with communication.
[/INDENT]MY EXPERIENCE:[INDENT]For this issue, I've had a good bit of experience. Being a regular member of various online communities for just about 25 years. I've been privileged to be a part of such emergent technologies as 300 Baud Modems, voice chat, BBS's, the fledgling IRC and a lot more. This doesn't qualify me as an expert as much as it establishes my experience in this realm of communication. In these computer-based worlds, typing what you want to communicate is the order of the day. As we've recently seen that face-to-face communication is being supplanted by text-messaging, increasingly, and the proliferation of large-scale networks where one's thoughts are "typed", I think the relavance makes it no longer avoidable to confront.
[/INDENT]THE PROBLEM:[INDENT]Increasing connectivity in our world has spawned an entire wave of disconnected people. Chatting, IM's, Text Messaging and Cell-Phone mania may seem like a boon for "staying connected" (and indeed more people are communicating these days because of it), but these things represent exponential damage to human interaction because of the sheer amount of meaning that's lost. Over 90% of our 'messages', in conversation, are communicated non-verbally (that is, without words). Now imagine how much more is lost when we take those words and abbreviate them; relegating any perpiscuity of thought down to "what's quickest to type". In essense; we take a flawed, subjective means for thought-transfer (read: communication) and break it more. As these communication mediums become more proliferated, our healthy, face-to-face interaction with each other decreases.
[/INDENT]Now, to all this, add the fact that people don't like to read. Take this message, for example. Assuming you don't already know Kheth's going off at the mouth (and have summarily dismissed this post), I'm guessing that less than 50% of you will have read this far down into this message. I remember an experiment, from a long time ago, where researches gave subjects a 1-page article to read. They were asked to read it as if they were in a hurry, but that it contained important information. 2nd to the last sentence they put the phrase: "... and if you read this sentence, stop here and raise your hand for a hundred-dollar bill". As I recal, less than 60% of those tested ever raised their hand.

So...

• We're more and more subject to typing-based forms of communication
  
• Using words alone means we've lost a lot of our meaning
  
• As we're more electronically-connected, we lose valuable face-to-face communication.
  
• We type quickly because, "... spelling it all out is just too much trouble".
  
• We tend to "gloss over" what we read, hurrying through and losing more
  

After all this: Someone asks if this sort of gross word-abbreviating of human thought - txtspeak - is a good thing.

Umm.. no

Thanks

I have to disagree with the need for formal writing to improve writing skills on this one. As much as profs really like it, it does not help me to improve. I get stressed out at the specific structures I must follow in class. On the philosophy forum here, it's casual and I feel my writing capabilities and critical thought has greatly improved. Persuasion? Probably not:lol:, but since when does a student persuade a prof, and not be too gifted for the formalities anyways?

Formality is only a structure, and it only helps to improve the writer's ability to use this structure. It is not very persuasive compared to other techniques of writing, IMO, and creative writing is much more important. To me, formal writing is using somebody else's approved mindset to demonstrate a completely different person's ideas. Not cool!

Creative writing has its place, but using standard English does as well. Formal writing always has seemed to me especially appropriate for philosophy, because it focuses itself on expressing ideas in a more neutral and "objective" manner that aids in clear expression of one's thoughts. It is a matter of self-discipline to become acquainted with its use and by practice to learns it rhetoric; this having been done, it is far less restrictive than one might think.

In formal writing you cannot use pronouns. If this were a thread restricted to formal writing I would have already failed.

And also, what rhetoric? Formal writing restricts persuasive rhetoric. When I try to write it that way, it just seems awkward and my opinions and connections unmanageable to the set of rules. We should just write away.

Hi boys...

what makes lnguage evolve it is the invents.

Carpe Diem et Memento Mori

Well, all writing is formal...All language is formal... I cannot say what is not formal....Within the form there is always greater or lesser formality...