I just saw a headline on rediff.com covering the England-India Test series. It read 'India off to a quite start'. The first line - James Anderson's first over was a maiden. They could have as well written 'India of 2 a quite start'! Language is getting rather confusing - it is not enough to know good language, one must know what is being used by the common man else one misses out on the actual communication. Remember how many people did not get what 'DKBose' stood for!
Words have become shorter thanks to SMSs which have brought a whole new language into our midst. Gr8, wid, u, v, chk, k are some of the words I have encountered! However many people are now under the impression that these shortened words are the real spellings.
Similarly 'facebook' also spawned several words which did not / do not make too much sense to me. Lol, ROFL were the two big ones that took a long time for me to figure out. (Haha, is another invention, not difficult to figure out, but I am surprised that one has to say that - hey its a joke!). I think 'D' also means something like that! 'Cum' (as in 'cum back soon') is another word that is really dicey but everyone keeps flinging it all over the place! I don't know what 'P' means yet but I will find out soon. But since most people spend all their time typing out smses and messages and stuff on facebook, I guess it is but natural that these words creep into other areas as well.
The same people grow up and become content and copy writers for magazines and web sites and newspapers. Naturally these kind of mistakes are bound to happen. I am only amazed at how fast it happened. Soon we may, if we have a young Prime Minister, who might respond to a live debate with a dashing 'k' (signifying that all is 'ok')
Time to sit and ponder over it 'quitely'. :D (or is it :P)
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4 comments:
Good read, Harimohan jii! I concur with you... that language is being redefined by so-called novel technologies. I wish people stop saying "Language is just a mode of communication" and realize that language defines, designs, and develops culture.
Yes it does of course. And so new cultures are born this way I guess.
After reading your blog with curiosity i had visited rediff site on fifth day of first test match and found that the same headline is flashed.
Everything has changed now a days. People started communicating in short (SMS), dressing in shorts, living life in short spells.
Earlier people used to attend classes for learning typing. Each and every person of Todays generation is expert in SMSing.
Yes, we are the rajahs of shortcuts. We take so many shortcuts that there is finally nothing to cut - we are in the same place!
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