DO U TXT    

Long ago it was said that vowels are really unnecessary in the English language.  I don’t know who said it, but I didn’t agree.  I’m changing my mind. 

In today’s most favored means of communication, vowels are losing out.  I’ve seen my granddaughters communicate with their friends and families.  A,E,I,O and U are definitely not in vogue, except for the O in OMG.  Oh, and of course, I.  That’s used a lot.  They are teenagers, after all.

Whether it’s instant messaging, or texting by means of telephone or computer on My Space or Facebook (the preferred venue, I found out, for older girls, i.e., mid-teens and up.  Evidently My Space has been taken over by those who are barely out of rug-rat stage.) the best way is the shortest way.  And by golly, they understand each other. I think.

It got me to thinking about the future.  I heard someone smart say that by the end of the century (like 2099, or 2101) business letters would be written in today’s texting styles.  In fact, this learned person said that resumes now are sometimes written in “text language”.

It used to be the goal of the English teacher to teach standards of English, so that the language could be passed on with changes coming at the speed of glacial movement.  IOW, whoops, in other words, language used to change approximately every 800 years.  The language of Chaucer (600 years old) is almost a foreign language to us today (try reading it without getting a headache.)  The language of Shakespeare, while romantic and poetic and elegant (so they say, forgetting that’s how Romeo 6-pack spoke), is more than 400 years old, half-way to becoming musty and unintelligible.  Aw, shoot, why not say it?  It already is.

The thing is, the world is moving fast these days.  From technology to science to language, changes are occurring so rapidly we can hardly catch up.  People don’t even speak the way they did in this country as little as 60 years ago.  For example, we never would have ended a sentence with a preposition then, if we were educated.  Not so today.  That rule is history even in the best publications. 

When I entered the radio business, NBC had a handbook of pronunciation guides…300 pages of the proper way to pronounce words.  Something as simple as the word lamentable which most of us would pronounce la-MENT-able.  If you were with NBC, you would have pronounced it LAM-ment-able.  To have done otherwise would have meant you erred (that’s uhrred, not aired).

The Associated Press had a style guide, and it is doubtful it is being observed faithfully these days.  Each new edition of Webster’s adds words and phrases that have caught on, at least temporarily.  Some won’t make it into subsequent later editions, but that’s because language is dynamic, a living, breathing organism.

It’s just that, like everything else, it is changing with increasing rapidity.  Dnt fght it, go w the flw.