Know-How Exchange : Our Forum

Chris,
A few comments from a skeptic.

There have been people who have attempted to stop the progression of language since Bork learned to make marks on the cave wall.

Where do we draw the line with English? With Chaucer's English? With King James' English? With Will Shakespeare's English? With 50-Cent's English?

I suggest we draw the line where as many of our target audience can understand it as possible.

So WH*s w/ U, old timer?

Written txt spk does make it harder for me to understand. But so too does a non-native English writer. Or even a poor speller.

If I don't understand something, I ask. If it's too much work for me to understand, I'll balance that with how much I want to communicate with the person and either give up or try harder.

I have to side with you Chris but I also shy away from using incorrect grammar. Many marketers only care that they gain attention. I still tend to be old-school and want to match goods or services to need. Education, truth in advertising and all that.

Back to the question at hand. I have resisted txt spk and yet just recently found myself short on time... I used it in a quick IM. I frown as I type because I had adamantly declared that I would always take the time to remain professional, and of course taking the time to use proper English is professional.

Perhaps if we liken today's txt spk to yesterday's shorthand we can better accept that it is not going away.

God forbid we shall soon see it used on a billboard!!

I hate txt speck, when texting my friends I alway you full words. It takes longer and sometimes goes on to a second txt but it is worth it.

That been said my spelling has go down hill since I started using MS Word in 99.

My Dear Chris

I feel that were our ice caps to follow the peregrinations of English, than they would shrink, grow, and move to all points of the compass. The language was ever thus – changing and fluid, but that does not stop one decrying some of the abominations which afflict it from time-to-time. Be assured; they pass.

For example, America as a great commercial nation was underpinned by the development of the electric telegraph which had a language of its own. Indeed, the originator of Morse, of code fame was an American. He was honoured all over Europe, where most telegraph systems were originally of other origins and even then used overwhelmingly by government and lovers, with trade coming a dismal third place. Typically, his statue in the USA was erected by a subscription raised from telegraph operators all over the world on the year that Alexander Bell was credited with inventing the telephone, which precipitated the demise of the telegraph.

The language of the telegraph was dictated by the rules. Capitals only, punctuation, where needed, to be spelt and being charged by the word, to the point. It took a lot of hints from Latin quotations and soon, users were inventing words so that they could use fewer and thus pay less! The telegraph companies responded by banning non-real words, so entire codes were written where a given word represented a whole phrase, meaning something entirely different. This sort of fizzled out because of the inherent capacity for mistakes which were essentially unseen by anyone until final translation and execution, resulting in many orders to buy 500,000 of one stock, when they really meant sell 50,000 of another.

As a consequence, although the language of the telegraph was used in polite “Business society”, from around 1844 to about 1901 when it was a major force, precious few of the words have survived until today. Many still think that the original language of the telegraph was rather ornate in comparison to the blasted whining of mosquitoes which constitutes modern text-speak. It started of as ornate, with Sam Morse transmitting his famous, “What hath God wrought” to Baltimore from the Washington Supreme Court in 1844, but at that time, no one was using it. By about 1875 it had over 10,000,000 users and the sentence, “BAD CAME AFT KEEN DARK ACHE LAIN FAULT ADOPT” would be translated at the stock exchange into 68 words saying, “Flour market for common and fair brands of western (flour) is lower-----$4000 bushels at $1.10 -----------------Only sale made was 2500 bushels at 67c”

Apart from the message or the decryption suffering from a distinct lack of poetry, the recipient was very much expected to know what the hell was going on, and as it was transmitted several times, God help the broker if someone got a letter wrong or misinterpreted a nuance.

Text, we will see off in a similar fashion – sloppiness is however pernicious and pervading and that includes forgetting about the shift key for capitals, despite the fact that the writer can still mangle punctuation.

Yours sincerely

Steven James Alker
Amateur Victorian

The evolution of our verbage comes with the evolution of technology. They go together like a shot of tequlla and a smoke (or for those who don't enjoy either of those try peanut butter and jelly?). The point is they are a package deal, and one of the largest world wide marketing trends is to stay with the times. Why do you suppose PR is what it is? It's new and it's news. The money generated through businesses that "Stay with the times." will surpass that of those who don't.

As for how we speak, well it's no different. This text language has evolved along with technology. Once upon a time we had phones. Then we had touch-tone phones, then cordless phones, then cellular phones, and now they are doing what they do best when they want to generate more from what they have. They combine. Look at Apple, or Blackberry. Touchscreen, mp3 capable, phone calling, movie playing, keyboards attached devices that sell like candy because they are with the times. The language is part and parcle to the very strand of continuance in the evolution of technology. Will it ever go back? Doubtful. There are always ideals instilled with the general population on how to speak english. From there the form of communication builds on itself. Take a look at the 70's. Do we talk the same way they did? Nope.

I can see by the sheer number of posts that lanquage is very important to marketeers or musketeers and well it should be. We want more than anything else to ensure the broadest audience of our potential customers understands what we are trying to communicate.

So I suppose the question becomes.

Dz a rws by ny othr nam sml as swt?

Actually I am a cro-magnon when it comes to instant messaging so I couldn't communicate in such abbreviated language even if I wanted to.

This all reminds me of course of a Mark Twain story where the old school Egyptians were arguing with the new school Phoenicians about alphabets.

The upshot was I believe that the Egyptian Old Schoolers took four hours and forty two minutes to write the same four sentences it took the youths who used the alphabet about thirty seconds to communicate.

In this day and age lanquage needs to be quick or your customers have moved on to something else.

Perhaps there is a small first mover advantage for the first person to put all their advertising messages into the abbreviated txt spk format.

Best regards and a pleasant weekend. C U N da Fny Paprs.
Phil Wesel

Communication evolves over time, the usage of SMS text to communicate can be traced to evolution of technology and changing lifestyle............Its emergence of "convinience techonology" like SMS has led to what i may say "convinient language" where you dont pay much attention to grammar or spellings and most importantly as our lifestyles become more hectic and fast paced .....i think lack of time also encourages such communication........

Here's what it boils down to I think. Remember back in Comm 101 -- where you draw the picture of the sender and the message path and the receiver? And you learn how it's the sender's responsibility to make sure to send the message gets to the receiver? Even with the QRM running through the message path. (How many relationships would be saved if people only really realized that it doesn't matter what you meant to say, it only matters what your receiver hears?)

It's all about flexibility yo!

Throw into the mix the ON-PURPOSE misspellings (ugh) that search engine optimization suggests and ebonics, and then anal people like me are faced with an every day cognitive dissonance that does not bode well for stable mental health.

Until those stick-on mind reader patches are available (my husband would appreciate that technology), I suppose we are all stuck with the responsibility of getting out the message to our receivers, even if it means crushin on something you wouldn't totally, like, ever wanna use.

Chris, you can stand under my umbuh-rella any day!

peace out or whatever,

Jennifer
XPRT Creative

Dear Chris

The main question you seem to be asking is, “Should we accept techno-variants of the English Language on this forum, along with poor grammar, spelling and lazy keyboard technique?” My answer is an emphatic no.

We are an international forum and the lingua-franca is English (Real English and a bit of US English) for the benefit of those to whom it is a second language and for the benefit of those for which it is a first language who should not need to translate postings from codswallop.

History can teach us some valuable lessons and I’ll go back to my earlier point about the ubiquity of the Telegraph, its antecedents and its successors. No one in Victorian or Edwardian times would have included a load of Telegraph-Speak in their letters to the Vicar or to their Father, because it would have been laughable and rude. The successor languages of the Telegram and the Telex stayed firmly on the bits of paper they were delivered on. You didn’t send one to “The Times” unless it was funny. My Father cycled over an incredibly difficult pass in Scotland called the Lairig Ghru when he was a leading member of a rescue team. He sent a Telegram to my mother, “LAIRIG DONE COMMA SO ARE WE STOP” who forwarded it to “The Times”. It was published!

When Newton developed the Calculus, his general letters and dinner time conversations were not littered with references to “Infinitesimally small increments of x such that dx/dy-----,” they were about the affairs of the world. When he wrote to the Admiralty, he told them in plain English that differentiation and integration would be very useful for blowing up ships! Once Leibnitz and others cottoned on to the idea of the Lingua Mathematica, they corresponded in an incomprehensible mathematical notation which has survived to this day. It nearly got them locked up, because the church thought that they might be promulgating heresy in code. I don’t think that it ever appeared in the works of Jane Austen a couple of centuries later.

Pitman popularised a better way of writing quickly, in full grammar. Millions learned it so that they could do dictation. I see no Pitman squiggles in the works of Hemmingway.

All scientists use their own language, for brevity and for clarity. I do. It takes an act of considerable effort to make the meaning accessible to the non scientist and though society dinner parties were at one time littered with twits waffling about Black Holes and Singularities, most of them hadn’t a clue what they were on about. Likewise, it’s rather difficult to explain “The Wasteland” by TS Eliot to a physicist, despite it being a superb piece of literature. I note that I find few headlines in the tabloid press starting off with “April is the cruellest month, breading lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire”

A science writer pal of mine recently pointed out that almost everything academic and practical is actually a language. The spoken and written ones are de-facto givens, but Mathematics, Genetics, Biochemistry, Physics, Computer Studies and so on are all just languages, each with their own syntax, grammar, meanings and even poetry.

Total bollocks in any of these languages, from English through to Cosmology is still bollocks and the use of quantum physics in a marketing forum is about as appropriate as splashing 200 words here in txt-rubbish with no capitals!

Best wishes

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions