Last Thursday one of my biggest fears was confirmed. I had suspected this moment would come eventually, but the fact that it happened so soon caught me slightly off guard. I am sad to report that Internet lingo is becoming the official language of our generation.
The evidence came from an Associated Press report that Finnish author Hannu Luntiala had published a book written entirely in text message shorthand. It's a story about a man's travels told through his handy-dandy text messages to his family back home.
At first this seemed like a clever idea, until I remembered what a book looked like. It's an often lengthy collection of pages that convey information or an idea through the arrangement of sentences.
That is, until Hannu.
According to the report, the ""roughly 1,000 [text messages] are listed in chronological order in the 332-page novel."" Even thinking about reading 332 pages worth of the jumble in my inbox makes my brain want to explode.
The beauty of language is that it is an ever-changing entity. New words and grammatical trends constantly affect the evolution of the written word. Thus, the older the piece, the harder it is to read. It's the reason I still hold a grudge against my high school English teachers for making me read (or, more accurately, decode) Shakespeare.
This evolution gave us contractions and acronyms, literary tools that undoubtedly make communication faster. It was with this reasoning I saw the ‘lol' emerging a few years ago and accepted it, even though I suspect people using it rarely go past a soft chuckle. Then the phrases started creeping into interpersonal conversations. People started verbalizing ""brb"" and ""lol,"" and it began to cross the line into absurdity.
I can't help but imagine 60 years from now, we will all sit down by the computer-generated image of a fire with a good e-mail and a cup of tea. No one will bother talking to each other, opting instead to just post on Facebook walls. Like blogging, ""pwning n00bs"" will get a spot in a future edition of the dictionary.
I can understand why people wud use shrt hand tho. Typing all those words in2 cell phones takes a long time. Why write out ""one"" when you can simply press ""1""? In this busy world, who has time 2 press 2 xtra buttons?
Still, the reason I h8 txt msg shrt hand is that it takes a beautiful language and turns it into 1 big grammatical error. Rife with misspellings and abbreviations, txting is a bigger travesty than putting pineapple on pizzaâ_and that's saying something. We save a few precious 2nds at the xpense of style. Btw, as I write this, my word processor's spell checkr is abt 2 overheat.
Perhaps years from now someone will pick up this column and revel in its antiquated language and bothersome grammar use—the missing link in an era of transition. Thnx in advance for reading.
