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"
No comments:
Post a Comment