Brighton |
We read to
connect with other minds. Every day I find that there is a lot to read and digest. There are always writings
for everyone who cares to read. But we have to be selective in what we read as
not only the information may be inaccurate and misleading, the writings may contain a lot of bad grammars
and spelling mistakes.
Last weekend, I
was feeling all drowsy, my head was hurting and my legs felt heavy. The doctor
confirmed that it was the flu bug, I felt miserable because I could not
concentrate and think clearly. I had been rather slow in getting to the end of
the novel, “ The Word Exchange” a
debut novel written by Alena
Graedon. It is a science fiction that talks about a world where prints
are dead and a group of some
unscrupulous people have invented
a virus that cause words to disappear and those infected with such a virus lose their ability to
communicate.
This week, the
columnist for the Sun daily newspaper , Nury Vittachi wrote in his article
entitled “Saving the apostrophe.” about how internet users frequently use the
phrase “Your” when they mean “ You’re ”. According to the said writer, by 2009
“your’ was replacing “you’re” in about 50% of the exchanges he monitored, and
today “your” has triumphed almost completely. Incidentally, there was some
typographical error in the sentence printed in the said article, so I presume
that he had meant about 50% and not more than 50% when it was printed as “about
than 50%”. The said writer was concerned about the rate the English language is
being mangled in print and on the internet and since modern dictionaries are
governed by the “descriptive not proscriptive” principle, which means ”your”
will soon appear as a legitimate alternative for “you’re”. If he calls for
“Save the Apostrophe meeting”, I will definitely attend.
Grand Cafe ,Oxford |
Due to the
common usage of abbreviation in our texts messages on our phones, we run the
risk of losing the ability to
spell our words correctly. Recently, in a group chat formed by some schoolmates via whats app, someone typed “G9”
another asked “ What is G9?” the person responded, “Good night is G9” and
advised the other person to get to
know text lingo. My daughter told
me that she used it when she
was thirteen and she has stopped
using since. With constant usage of words that sound like the actual words we
are meant to write, we can gradually lose touch with the actual spelling of
these words. When we text, we let our grammar slide and we use short forms. A
few weeks ago, someone took a snap shot of two signboards that were placed on
the road that led to the place where some by-election was taking place. One
signboard read:“Sorry for the inconvenience erection going on” while the
other one read: “ Road is temporary closed for erection”. It is funny yet it is
no laughing matter.
Sloppiness not
only appears in emails and text message, it appears in newspaper and all kinds
of printed materials including signboards and brochures that are being
distributed at the shopping malls. At work, if I were to insist on having every
email and letter that is written in English to contain absolutely no
grammatical or spelling errors before they are sent out , not only I would get very little work done, I would consume more time, more paper and more ink for the printer. In fact we seriously need an editor to proofread every
single letter if we demand perfection. Once upon a time, I had staff telling my
office partner that she was resigning because I had made her correct the same
letter and type it umpteenth times. What she had omitted to note was that it
was due to the errors that had appeared in those letters. These days I have become far less
demanding as I figure that we cannot afford the time and also the wastage of
precious stationery. Since words can be easily corrected on computers, staff
pays even less attention to their typing, as a result, the work gets more sloppy. It would appear that the
switch from typewriters to computers certainly have not saved millions of trees
and now we have discarded parts of the computers to deal with for our
environment.
How can we
convey a message effectively if we are unable to spell the words and use the
grammar correctly? The standard of English is declining due to the way we
communicate via text messages and social media. It is an epidemic.
In The
Word Exchange, words get scrambled and language is disappearing, as a result,thoughts and memories
are in danger of becoming disposable. The protagonist, Anana Johnson works with
her dad, Doug, who is a lexicographer at the North American Dictionary of the
English Language, and they are hard at work on the final edition of the
dictionary that will ever be printed. One evening, Doug disappears and Anana
has to search for Doug based on a single code word : ALICE. The writer of the
book, Alena Graedon divides the book into three sections, THESIS, ANTITHESIS
and SYNTHESIS. Imagine a world where we are glued to handheld devices called Memes that keep us in
constant communication and can hail a cab before we leave our offices. The users do not commit the words they have learnt to their memory instead they relegate that chore to their Memes. As the story goes, the Memes even create and sell words in a digital
marketplace called the Word Exchange.
“Rather than catalog a long litany of the Meme’s dangers, how ever, we will focus on the sphere of our greatest concern: communication. How we write and read. How we listen and speak, including to ourselves. In other words, how we think. It is comforting to believe that consigning small decisions to a device frees up our brains for more important things. But that begs the question, which things have been deemed more important? And what does our purportedly decluttered mind now allow us to do? Express ourselves? Concentrate? Think ? Or have we simply carved out more time for entertainment? Anxiety ? Dread?
We fear that Memes may have a
paradoxical effect – that indeed, contrary to Synchronic’s claims, they tend to
narrow rather than expand consciousness, to the point where our most basic
sense of self-our interior I –has started to be eclipsed. Our facility for
reflection has dimmed, taking with it our skill for deep and unfettered
thinking. And another change is taking place ;our capacity for communication is
fading.
In the extreme cases, Meme
users have been losing language. Not esoteric bits of linguistic ebris but
everyday words: ambivalence, Paradox, naïve. The more they forget, the more
dependent on the device they become, a frightening cycle that only amplifies
and that has grown to engulf another of Syndronic’s innovations, the Word
Exchange.”
Oxford |
The fear is
real. The Word Exchange
is highly recommended. Alena Graedon is ingenuous and
ingenious. It is time for us to save the WORDS from further abuse and misuse otherwise we might be heading towards a dystopian future where words lose their meanings.
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