Diablog:  On contemporary language and usage…

 

Raven, Jan at Secular Blasphemy, and Rob at Emphasis Added all chimed in this week on language usage.  It’s an important topic, meriting our full attention.  The context of America’s elected leadership’s operation may not agree with the will of the people; without understanding their intentions established in word and text, we may be led astray.

 

While it’s important for this reason to understand formal English (comprehend the very language in which our laws are written), it’s important to realize that our daily language is dynamic, changing and contextual.

 

Look at the very nature of diablog itself; we’ve conjured a word to address a dialogue which takes place between web loggers in the context of this networked medium.  Should I be forced to say, Lo, web loggers, here we share dialogue amongst these many pages?

 

Forsooth, nay. 

 

Umm, hell no.

 

Even Shakespeare in 16^th century England wrote for a common man, in a way which persuaded his audience as quickly as possible, employing pauca verba.  Hap for Perhaps, as an example.  It was street slang at the time.  The language of the day, then current slang even failed Shakespeare under such pressure; Shakespeare is credited with adding 3,000 words to the English language.  (I’m not certain that Hap isn’t one of those words!)

 

Shakespeare also documented the spoken word, not the written word.  Not literature intended to be pored and pondered over, studied at length.  He created dialogue for the popular medium of the time; any person standing in an open theater like the Globe, could hear and comprehend readily this lingua franca, a common speech, in spite of the nature of the venue at the time. 

 

Imagine it, cheek and jowl with a mass of smelly, unwashed, muddy people, actors standing in a theater open to the sky above, a stage jutting out into this sea of humanity, no microphones or speakers.  Boos and hisses, cabbages and rotten tomatoes, likely to be thrown at any time if any passage did not capture this sweaty mass of man.  The Bard had a single chance, a second, to catch their ear before the eggs flew.  Talk about interactive…

 

We no longer speak this 16^th century language day-to-day.  Shakespeare’s English is difficult for many to understand nowadays.  But think only how our language would sound to Shakespeare and his kind; we’d make no sense to him, either. 

 

Both our written and spoken language changed unceasingly over the centuries.  Even in the span of one and two hundred years our language has grown with technology, shrunk with the size of the globe.  Recall books like Melville’s Moby Dick, or Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady; they possess a certain floridity with which we’re no longer comfortable.  Words written within the last century are also not of the language we use today; Fitzgerald’s writing and that of his contemporaries are clearly different from Kerouac, and again from Mailer or Morrison.  We hear the vast difference in our spoken word when reflecting on speeches written at the time of the Civil War; again, written for common people, documenting the spoken word.  We no longer speak in this way: Four score and seven years ago…

 

The concept of speaking and writing have fundamentally changed.  Text pagers, Instant Messaging, voicemail, voice emails, emails converted to speech, graphical user interfaces with embedded objects…are these mediums of dialogue, monologue?  Should the same rules of speech or written language apply to what is becoming an entirely different beast, a hybrid?

 

Marry, not. 

 

Heck, no.

 

The context in which the message is delivered is different; consumption is different.  While I may very well say, Lord of the Rings multiple times in the course of a conversation with someone I don’t know well, I’ll cut to the chase on a cell phone and say, Yeah, I saw Rings last night.  The clock is ticking, time is money, and I’m not going to waste air time on the full-blown version when my friend already knows what Rings means.  It’s implied between close friends, a social liberty granted between persons of like mind.  A license.

 

License is granted to those using hybrid media for communication as well, because of limitations of time and space.  A 26-character screen encourages economy, just as Shakespeare’s muddy Globe Theatre encouraged a common simplicity.  Ergo, Lord of the Rings becomes LOTR.

 

The medium’s demand for economy doesn’t justify not learning formal English; real mastery of economy comes with genuine knowledge of the art.  A real artist who’s studied thoroughly can communicate volumes with a paucity of paint.  It’s the other way around: the hybrid medium does not work with the full-blown language.  The artist of the language must meet it.

 

If there’s some way to do it better, dear English masters, prithee tell us.

 

Go ahead, dish.

 

In the meantime, let us do as Morse and his followers did, engineer this language to work within the given medium and context until something better comes along, perhaps a new lingua franca.

 

Else hie thee hence.

 

Does that need translation?

  1:20:35 PM    comment []