Maybe because you're a member of S2Ki he figures you're cool like that! Personally, I don't sign some of my emails and if I do it's just first name. Why? Because my email address is my name.

 

I don't think the language is evolving to this degree. I remember when shorthand came out and reading that it was going to be taught in all the schools and how efficient it would be etc... next revolution in language......

We have writers today who use our language to paint pictures by placing words in certain order so that they roll off the tongue a certain way. This is using our language in the highest and most formal way. Truly a writing techinque for the gifted... like Chaucer.

To judge how language was being used for every day use most people look at the common prints read by majority of the public. IE: Newspapers or flyers (before newspapers).

I don't think that Chaucer would address the wealthy patrons who viewed his work with "Yo Money how you like those rhymes"

I do see a day where we may have a formal and an informal type of written language. I don't see day coming in which an English Professor at Harvard emails his students with:

U ppl will b xpctd 2 have ur wrk dun on tym. No1 will b allwed n l8t 4 class.

Just my observation from being a groundling in a former life

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by w1ngman
Shall I make a social observation? Consider this:

Here bygynneth the Book of the Tales of Caunterbury

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for the seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

Ahhh...blessed Geoffrey Chaucer . He's a bit of a booger to read, huh? And yet, he lived between 1342 and 1400AD. Quite a bit closer to our own "Modern English" written language. Why do we, in this day of "Modern English" and in deference to "Old English" (and its even older period of c600-1100 AD), believe that we could not be witnessing an evolution of our own English language? Sure, this alteration of words and phrases such as "you're" (to ur) and "great" (to gr8)...heck...even smilies may well make it into our "Ultra-Modern English" ...but the fact might well remain that e-mail, chat, blackberry, cell phones, you name it...our digital age in tandem with our hectic schedules is evolving our English language. These shifts in words are phonetic evolutions. We may not like them...but why should we condemn them (except that we despise them ).

Of course the language is evolving. However, evolving naturally for ease of speech, and evolving by lack of education and "hooked on phonics" are two very different things. Spelling like a three year old used to be a novelty. Nothing new though indeed. The CEO of my company along with most top officials can't form a comprehensible sentence. Here's an aside. There exists NO dictionary in the entire company (except for one I have squirreled away in my office). Yo!

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Quick2K
*shudders*

 

But what does communication comprise?

I submit that while efficiency can be a component of communication, perhaps more so are nuance, eloquence, subtlety and grandeur - amongst others - that the lion's share of e-mailers soundly trash.

 

! |-|@|) a 6|23@+ |)a`/ a7 7h3 B3@<|-| //1+|-| `/0u +0d@`/ =)

That any better?

 

Yo KIMMAY! Lighten up!

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Bishop6
! |-|@|) a 6|23@+ |)a`/ a7 7h3 B3@<|-| //1+|-| `/0u +0d@`/

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by magician

 

Many of the people who post here cannot truthfully make this claim, judging from what we see here.

Furthermore, writing is a skill that, as with most skills, requires practice to do well. Someone who needs to write well for a term paper is squandering opportunities to practice when he writes e-mails "efficiently".

(I frequent a forum of magicians with the same affliction: misspellings, improper vocabulary, atrocious grammar, psychotic punctuation, and so on.)