Skip to main content

The Madness that is SMS Language


Very few things get my goat as much as SMS language. This baffling code language consisting of random abbreviations and amputations of decent words has gone too far in my book. Confined to a personal message meant to convey an urgent something, as in "B back a.s.a.p. Pls prep dinner b4 7", it is entirely harmless and may even be practical. But let loose in the formal world of academia, it is an unstoppable plague that threatens the dignity of those who love words simply because they are multi-syllabic and melodious when pronounced.

Jokes aside, the popularity of SMS language among sensible teenagers and adults is so widespread that it is now on the verge of sucking standard language use into its black hole of no return. No retrieval possible. As a result, what you see these days is a whole generation of students (and adults) who have no clue what the apostrophe is meant for. They, foreseeably, also cannot tell the difference between "your" and "you're", "its" and "it's", and "there" and "they're" (Facebook users, are you reading this?). To compound the horror, there exists a legion of SMS fanatics who are beginning to shorten words which common sense tells us can never be shortened. You get head-scratchers like "hav" (for "have"), "tis" (for "this"), "de" (for "the"), "bin" (for "been"), "gud" (for "good"), and, my personal favourite, "fren" (does anyone even know how to spell the original word these days?). Why these words are shortened I have no clue (mental laziness probably has "sumting" to do with it). But it is the fact that somebody actually thought it was possible to shorten them that unnerves me. Allow me to be pedantic (as if I were only about to be), "tis" can NEVER be "this", because "this" actually has the (voiced) "th" sound, and "gud" can NEVER be "good" because "gud" has a short vowel whereas the vowel in "good" is an elongated one ("guud" would be more accurate).

Why is it important to distinguish between "your" and "you're"? Because, as one of the Monty Pythons would say, your mother is a hamster, but you're an enormous cow for thinking you can get away with using SMS language!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Comments are always appreciated! Do feel free to leave them or start a discussion.

Popular posts from this blog

What is Freedom?: Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Age of Reason” (Part 1)

The first instalment of Jean-Paul Sartre’s trilogy Roads to Freedom , The Age of Reason ( L’ Â ge de Raison , 1945), compels the modern reader to re-define the idea of freedom, conventionally worded as “the condition of being free of restraints” (The Free Dictionary). “Free of restraints” is murky waters when it comes to Mathieu and Daniel, the two main characters of Sartre’s soul-searching work.  Sartre’s characters are primarily “for-itself beings,” existentially free persons who act according to the choices that have moulded them. The words “existentially free” are oxymoronic, and the phrase “free persons who act according to the choices that have moulded them” is painfully paradoxical. This is classic Sartrean paradox: it tells you that as an individual you are “free” to make choices, but these choices are pre-determined by a whole other set of choices beyond your control or manipulation. Mathieu Delarue has made the mistake of impregnating his mistress of seven ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Approaching Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore” the Jungian Way

“The world of gods and spirits is truly nothing but the collective unconscious inside me.” – Carl Jung, On the Tibetan Book of the Dead What appears to be supernatural and surrealistic in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore  does not have to remain that way once we accept that in Murakami’s fictional world, the natural and the supernatural often cross paths and become one single unity. In the previous three entries on the novel, I have extensively discussed its relation to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex . But here I intend to explain why the supernatural should in fact be deemed natural, and how this reasoning is a direct reference to the theories of Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and German philosopher G.W. F. Hegel, both of whom are mentioned in the novel. Carl Jung’s psychological theory on the “collective unconscious” (the notion positing that all humans – regardless of race and culture – share a psyche containing “latent predispositions towards identical reactions” [1...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sound of Alienation: Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Voices”

In the nine “Voices” poems (“Die Stemmen,” 1902), we find Rilke speaking out for those who have suffered pain and injustice. He insists that in order for them to be heard, they need to “advertise” themselves, and this should be done through singing, or songs – like the castrati (referred to as “these cut ones”) who sing to God and compel him to stay and listen. This message is found in the “Title Leaf” – an introduction of sorts to the nine songs. It is tempting to read the nine songs (“Beggar’s,” “Blind Man’s,” “Drunkard’s,” “Suicide’s,” “Widow’s,” “Idiot’s,” “Orphan Girl’s,” “Dwarf’s,” “Leper’s”) as a collection of poetic pleas for social awareness. This is due to Rilke’s “casting choices”; he has selected society’s most conspicuous outcasts as the main speakers of his poems. When, for instance, the beggar in “The Beggar’s Song” says, “I go always from door to door/rain-soaked and sun-scorched,” we are induced to sympathise with his downtrodden fate. The same can be said for...
Post a Comment
Read more