Explanation, not a rant

A friend of mine made a very good point after he saw this blog. With his permission I'll post part of his message to me and respond to it as a kind of explanation for how I feel about pop grammar's effect on the people who use it:

I hate the changes in modern spelling. It either grew from laziness or has beget it. I work in the school system, and the spelling of the modern youth has been completely derailed by the constant fluctuations in pop grammar. I believe heavily in the act of learning what is, and not changing pace before you've even left the gate. Not to mention that phonetics have never shifted, the words are pronounced identically to the "real" way of spelling, which makes multiple methods baseless and over-numerous. I think Twitter in itself has become a cesspool of intellectual stagnation as parroting and plagiarism have become the name of the game. This contrivance with our generation becoming THE anti-status quo has just made us a new status quo.

I'm currently enrolled in my university's teacher licensure program and the thought of teaching standard English kind of terrifies me. I've never been a stickler for prescriptive, strict grammar. I've always been interested (even obsessed) with descriptive grammar and grammar fluctuations. I feel that since our communication is changing so rapidly via the internet/texting, nonstandard usages and pop grammar are bleeding into the places that standard edited English should be used. That's when you end up getting kids using symbols, abbreviations and dialect in papers, assignments, resumes and interviews. "Teaching English" is going to resemble its namesake more than ever in the years to come because instead of honing in on proper style and refining the language it's going to be the actual teaching of the separate, foreign dialect of standard English in order for my students to succeed in the "real world." There have to be separate schemas for school/profession and casual conversation and that is something that has to be taught before we can label pop grammar changes as "bad" or "detrimental" to the language. It's not bad, it's different. We have to find a way to teach the difference between how they speak or type and how the professional world expects them to speak or type.

That is not the only problem I see, though. As we express ourselves through text we shouldn't have to feel the constant burden of conforming to the standard because people don't have the proper ways to differentiate between the two worlds. Facebook is no place for SE (except in those weird and awkward professional and academic messages when you friend a boss or professor or something). Twitter is definitely not a place for SE and we have to remember that limiting people's expression so that they can fit a standard isn't right (!imo!). I'm not going to correct myself for saying "y'all" because it is nonstandard (given, this is a very mild infraction). Better example: I'm not going to censor people for "African American English" (Hate the term, love the actual dialect) and the non-conjugation for the verb "to be" (I be going to the bathroom etc) unless they use it when standard English is formally or academically expected.

I'm looking forward to studying and sharing all sorts of awesome shit from the internet and speech but I can't say I completely understsand the full ramifications of it changing our grammar. I don't know if it's for the better or for the worse and really, who can know?

Thoughts?

Also- Here's a cool (and scary!!!) article about a similar phenomenon in China and Japan called "character amnesia"

Mind your gs and qs

I'm not going to be the person who tries to single-handedly beat down linguistic close-mindedness so this blog is going to be less about criticism and more about appreciation of linguistic phenomena.

The word "morniqq" was trending on twitter a few days ago and I delved deeper into the twittersphere only to discover that there is a whole subgroup of tweeters (and facebookers, as I have found) that replace gs with qs.

AWESOME!!
How cool is it that we can stylize our language and have it still retain value? Fuckinq awesome. Ever since we could communicate on the internet with AIM 1.0 we've been trying to think up innovative ways to make our text stand out using the only tools we have: the text itself. ReMeMbEr ThIs? Or did u type lyk thiis? Maybe you were too xxhardcorexx for that. Maybe you were a l33t h4x0r. We *still* do it (see what I did there!)

 I mean purely from a graphical standpoint that rules. q is much cleaner than g. g has a weird hook/blob thing at the bottom of it and q is a circle and a line. Clean and simple. This group has figured out a way to style their text using elements they already have BUILT INTO THE FUCKING ALPHABET to make what they say both mean something and look cool.

Remember those xs in your screenname in middle school? This is like that except instead of using letters to make words look nifty by accentuating them and adding additional flourish, this sticks that style right in the fucking middle (or end) of the goddamned word. No extra shit necessary (well, there is, but I'll get to that later)
check this shit:

This lady is a hard-working mamma with style.

Then I looked a little deeper and found that this q-as-g phenom is utilized in much more stylish writing. There's a trend on twitter where people duplicate the last few letters or vowels in a word. Cheqq it:

D:

This is a lot heavier and slower to read and I usually find myself reading it in a really drawn-out head voice. Still awesome, though. Repetition of letters just looks cool and that's enough justification it needs. 

Lastly I bring you this,

q as g, z as s, i as y, omission of vowels and at the end, who even knows. BUT I STILL LOVE IT SOOOOOO MUCH!

Sometime you should look up "omq" or "qood morniqq" on twitter or youropenbook.org and see what cool trends are popping up left and right.

CHEQQ YA'LL L8R

Excuse the gushing, I'll post the good stuff soon

I've finally gotten the guts to start a blog about pop linguistics. I'm obsessed with the language of our generation: the language of drunk i-love-you-mans, of high wait what was I talking abouts, of facebook statuses, of twitter trends, the language of the media, popular music and the constantly changing flow of language as we the teenagers and the twenty-somethings shape it.
Where better to start off than the fastest and most immediate catalyst of this hella awesome phenomenon, the interweb itself?

I guess I'm directing this towards any of y'all who, like me, are hopelessly addicted to pop culture (and who also feels the love for nonstandard English.) Anyone who listens to the hit station on the radio and revels in the sick-nasty constructions of the hip hop pioneers of contemporary language. Anyone who reads twitter trending topics just to look at people using qs as gs or listens to campus conversations just to hear the pips and quirks of student life expressed through strings of astounding swears, "yeah bros" and "gettin' schwasteds." This, however, is not solely directed toward that small group. Anyone who wants to partake should. If you have ever heard a song on the radio, a friend's ipod or seen a facebook status that made you stop and think "holy shit that's weird....but awesome!" (or even just "that's weird and dumb") this is for you, too. Anyone who wants to notice the changes, the trends and the cool as hell shit that gets posted on the internet and sung on mtv should. That's what this blog is about.

-Anna