English. RIP
March 20th 2009 17:31
Vincent van Gogh, Sorrow (1882)
The language as we know it is doomed. The pressures of change have grown until they are irresistible. Twitter may be the straw which breaks the back of English. Perhaps it is it too late. Language as we knew it.
Who uses full-form written language any more? For many people, the majority of their writing each day is on their phone. Even experts in the latter-day fine art of predictive text use short forms.
The condensed codes of SMS appear, not surprisingly, ever more in emails, the other daily writing exercise for most people. Letters (remember them?) had a culture of elegance and wholeness. Email is communication on the run.
Facebook asks us what we are doing now. Social media has elevated the mundane to a first-tier communication mandate. It goes without saying that it should be short.
And now Twitter has made an art form of it, or at least some of the cleverer Tweeters have done so. Our lives in 140-character snatches. Less is okay; more is forbidden.
The poets will feel at home. The ghosts of the telegram, or telegramme as we spelled it in more expansive days, are laughing.
Hemingway knew how to deliver large pictures in lean text, but surely even he would feel constricted by Facebook's narrow wall and Twitter's imperious imprisonment of free-flowing speech.
Some bloggers are offering resistance, but the how-to manuals warn you to keep posts short. Your readers have become conditioned. Short attention spans rule the blogosphere.
English. RIP.
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