Thursday, February 3, 2011

Mind your language

Here is an article which i wrote about 5 months back for my college (web) magazine, Entelechy. This month it got selected by the press club and is getting published in the 25the edition of Entelechy.


When the human race was at a stage where language was not developed, there would not have been many ideas in a man’s head to think about, let alone to share with the others of his community. Without the primitive knowledge of any language, a brain does not think beyond the range of personal experiences. Just look around you and try to think about the first thing you see, but no words are allowed in your thoughts. Getting my point? You don’t have definite chain of thoughts before you start using any language you know. Thus the language is the medium of thought. (Well, if you are a musician or a painter, may be then you sometimes do get thoughts which do not need any language to carry them forward, but that is a different scenario.)


After the cavemen uttered the first words which went on to form a basis of a formal language, there had been a lot of advances in the language theory, including the invention of writing system in most languages. The language went on to become a very important art form. People wrote plays, poems and novels and far more enjoyed reading them.


Then internet was invented, and a couple of decades later a bunch of people made communities to destroy all that had been worked for, in developing a formal lingual system and the art form that was created out of it. Let’s call these people, the language destroyers.


“LOLLZZZZ”,”LMAO”,”ROFL”,”OMG”, these are some of the “expressions” you find on the social networking websites. One might defend a fellow destroyer when he/she writes “thnx hv gud de” to express what we know as “thank you, have a good day!” by saying that it’s just a way to express yourself with using less number of alphabets. I say, what do you think about this one line I found, “hEy pEOpLe hOwZ iT gOoiNg”? And if that wasn’t not enough there are the “ma” and “mah”s (the later one does not even decrease the number of alphabets!).


I wonder what urges a person to write “mah bike so kool”. And what’s more, the population of the “KOOL” people is increasing day by day. It has come to my notice that one fine day a fresher from our college joined the destroyer’s squad, posted “wHt uP FoLkS” on his facebook page after a long history of writing like a normal person, and s/he hasn’t looked back since. Some of them even chat like that! Trust me; it’s very infuriating to be on the other side of that chat and receiving each and every word in a randomized sequence of alphabets written in upper and lower cases, with half the spellings customised and most of the vowels missing.


Now let us go one more step further. One day I heard someone speaking “words” from the destroyers’ vocabulary, as if cluttering cyberspace with them was not enough, and from his facial expressions I could make out that the person/destroyer on the other end had made a comic remark. The destroyer I watched and heard went “LOLLLZZZ OMG….ROFLOL” The pronunciation I guess was “law-luh-zuh(let the ‘zuh’ linger for 2 seconds) oh-em-jee raw-fuh-law-luh.Many of you will agree that hearing phrases as “ULTI LOL” and “OMG” are common. If this continued, we may expect a certain change in the way they write novels these days. After about 50 years the destroyer author will write “and she had a beautiful smile” as “she LOLed beauti4ully”, “I chuckled” as “MEE LMAOed”, “Oh! Dear god, all my dreams are shattred” as “OMFG, ol mah dreams r screwed”. (I apologize for my lack of knowledge of the destroyer skills, as I have not studied their ways in too much depth).


Even though the words in the league of the F-word are not banned from social groups, they are at least frowned upon (and that’s the reason I had had to use the word “destroyer” instead of something more suitable in the first place), but these pseudo-words are neither banned nor frowned upon. More and more words of these kinds are getting the acceptance of first the cyber communities and then the everyday speech. Please good people stop the abuse, let the likes of Shakespeare rest in peace.

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