shop talk: English (r)evolution--an aural lashing
A recent facebook share of the Oatmeal’s “How to use an Apostrophe" chart prompted a friend to express that he felt the apostrophe on the whole, was more of a hindrance than using it properly was worth: why not stop using it altogether? Don’t we ‘get it’ without wasting precious texting characters on often-misused teardrop-shaped silences anyway (so he implied)?My personal affront with grammar-gauche internet parlance is on par with that of those who shy from words like ‘parlance’: we the word snobs who point out that, for the love of god, it’s ‘80s not 80’s in every comment box we come upon are as unpopular as grade-school snitches. Why fight it? Why not just hand over the lunch money their wanting alot from us? Well all get along better neways.Perhaps it would be simpler to slip into an onomatopoeic porridge, pre-fifteenth century sans Cawdrey’s 1604 standardization of spelling, where words gained poetic illumination through the addition of an extra vowel. You have to admit there’s charm in the Chaucerian sound. Writers worth a penny know that if you’re intentionally misspelling, you better have a good reason for it. Allowing free-form spelling and grammar to go the distance could radically unite us! We’d understand each other despite personal choices about whether they’re, their or there best describes the location of something. It all sounds the same when you’re pointing at it.However, we know that the legal and medical fields, to name a few, would suffer, for an improperly-placed comma can make all the difference between a crucial clause or an unnecessary slice. Whether a reader is seasoned or just learning, the eye stumbles on irregularities. For most, our language centre inexorably links sounds to two-dimensional shapes as we learn to read: patterns are key. This is what written language is: we’ve moved on from hieroglyphics, and even they had rules of style. Rendering grammar, usage and spelling patterns chaotic because it’s too hard to learn how to use an apostrophe is being lazy about the language, and very much like trying to raise the Babel tower, and we all know how that worked out.~~~*I should note here that text and chat-speak have their own valid and highly useful lexicon, which is not of consequence here…unless the chatter forgets the difference between mid-term paper and txts to bffs, producing gems such as “Hamlet was like—imd, he killed my dad so wtf, wdyw?”“Hamlet was like—in my defence, he killed my dad so what the f***, what do you want?”