Wired copy chief vents spleen over language and email
The Copy Chief at Wired News Tony Long has written an acidic attack 
on the role of technology in the decline of writing standards.
It is technology — IM, text messaging and email — which he argues is (mostly) to blame:
“it doesn’t matter whether you are reading your local rag, surfing the net or trying to make heads or tails of someone’s inane blog — the quality bar is set lower than ever.”
Whether or not you find his argument persuasive, you will enjoy the verbal imagery.
It runs the whole gamut from poetic (”[Email's] speed and informality sing a siren song of incompetent communication, a virtual hooker beckoning to the drunken sailor as he staggers along the wharf.”) to the more direct (”… it’s not enough to simply vomit out of your fingers. It’s important to say what you mean clearly, correctly and well…. It’s important to think before you write.”)
I want to believe him. Goodness knows there’s some barely legible stuff out there. But are things really more badder?
I couldn’t shake a niggle from the back of my mind. Then I remembered what it was:
…Two evils, Ignorance and Want of Taste, have produced a Third; I mean the continual Corruption of our English tongue, which, without some timely Remedy, will suffer more by the false Refinements of Twenty Years past than it hath been improved in the foregoing Hundred.
— Jonathan Swift, “The Continual Corruption of our English Tongue”, The Tatler, 1710.
Tags: email, grammar, IM, Jonathan Swift, language, punctuation, standards, technology, text, the good old daysRelated posts
February 21st, 2006 at 11:23 am
Fantastic find. I was about to “WTH” your use of the word “niggle,” as I thought it was fictitious term - until I checked it in OS X’s dictionary.
Now I’m all, like, ROFL.
February 21st, 2006 at 5:16 pm
LMAO :)
February 22nd, 2006 at 4:26 am
As an old editor, and a extensively published writer, there’s a strong side of me proud of his essay… and another laughing at it. You have to remember that every generation loathes the next — mocks it’s grammar and it’s slang, laughs at it’s apparent lack of appreciation for the education ’side of things’. In short, there’s a different side of genius in each age, some focused on more and the next; he’s holding onto the old rules as if they have some meaning… I’d like to extend him the middle finger and remind him that my generation made new rules where he doesn’t apply.
There are strict interpreters of the language, there are loose interpreters of the language. The strict tried to chastise Keroauc for his Beat Mystique, they blasted Oscar Wilde for his crass sarcasm and ignored Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.
He even notes:
Now, we can argue that all of us are slightly annoyed with the ‘brb’ and the ‘lol’ at times — but it stinks of a pompous, self righteous writer who has to dip his toe into something bigger than himself to announce a generation has done ‘violence’ to the accepted standards. Me oh my. Some people would call that evolution, breaking the rules, digging a new path, testing the waters, artistic merit, and whatever old school cliche you can think of to term what we know to be true: the times, they are a changin’, to quote Bob Dylan.
In the end, I’m not so sure his rant is really more than self righteous mental masturbation — I hope it makes him feel superior and, undoubtedly, forgotten.
That’s my counter rant:)
February 22nd, 2006 at 7:22 am
Although Mr. Long admits that we can’t lay all the blame on technology, I would like to suggest that none of the blame rests there. Technology is just a tool. As with any tool, it can be used well or poorly depending on who wields it. The real blame belongs to inadequate education and low standards.
My wife and I have four children who range in age from 10 to 15. They use e-mail, instant messaging, video conferencing, and other Internet tools daily to interact with their good friends from another family who live in another state.
We’ve taught our children to read and to love good literature. We’ve encouraged them to write. And we set the standards high.
The result is that it is truly a joy to watch them interact using technology. They use it for all sorts of creative endeavors. They’ve collaborated to write books, movie scripts, poetry, and songs. They constantly work on their web site together. Technology provides a way to cooperate that would not otherwise be possible.
And even Mr. Long might be pleased to watch this group of children and teens use instant messaging. Sure, they make use of abbreviations to save typing, but they also spend plenty of time discussing good books they’ve read and sharpening each other’s skills by correcting their own grammar and spelling.