Katie, I couldn't agree more with you.  It seems that we have gotten in such a hurry that we can't communicate without shortening by leaving out words and letters.

As the literary guild president in school for four years I absolutely adore Language. I love the way it flows off the tongue and even through a computer it is still easy to convey how you feel through language and how you use it.

I can't stand it when people don't use capital letters and punctuation. When everything is in short hand. What is the purpose of that?


To each their own but I will still try as hard as possible to make sure that everything I write or post is intelligible and well written and hopefully 100% accurate in spelling.

Cheers~ Rae Monroe

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my lesson in this was when my dad, a great guy, in the late 1960s would refer to blacks as Negros or "colored people."  I challenged him on this.  He responded by reminding me that I had NO black friends while he had several... and that to him (in his lexicon) these were respectful terms.  In short he was too old to learn.  That vocabulary of what is proper and respectful has (and probably will continue to) changed.

More to the point, we now use words with a con-notated meaning that differs from the denoted meaning.  Also how we communicate is now very different than our communcation method of just a few years ago.  I can remember the first time I used a fax - only 1988... and now?  I rarely fax, rather send the document by an attachment to the e-mail.

Our language will continue to change as we assimilate other words from other cultures, out of necessity invent new words to encompase new concepts and ideas and develop new "norms" for expression.  Perhaps we should go back to the days of...

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour,
Whan Zephirus eek with sweete breeth
Inspired into hath holt and heeth
The tendre croppes and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open yeeye
(so priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,  
To ferne halwes shrines, kowthe in sondry londes lands;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen them whan that they were seeke

I am also reminded of my yut! (remember the language in "my cousin vinnie"? - what's a yut?)  I grew up in a small town in southern Louisiana - where they still spoke French - but the French of 18th century France.... they did not use many of the words that a Frenchman living in France would use... such as le avion for the airplane... instead if they were talking about an airplane - they would substitute the word AIRPLANE for the french word... a case of isolated language development.

While I am old!  Ancient by some standards, I've had to adjust - I have two young 'uns...  how they communicate is totally different from when I was a kid.... but how I communicated was totally different from how my dad and his generation communicated...

Sorry this is so long... but it is surprising that one so young would long for the "good old days!"


 



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