[CLUE-Talk] Looks like our brains match \w+

[Jef Barnhart]

English has always been evolving. If I were you Zonker I would just get
used to it. There are several things that are against you, and everybody
for that matter.

1) Technology. (MMMmmm... technology)
   Internet.
   SMS text messaging.
   Reliance on spell checkers and grammar checkers.
The rate at which ideas and thoughts are to be conveyed is getting
faster and faster. Speech is the fastest way to convey an idea. Think
about how long it took me to write this message as apposed to standing
in front of you speaking to you. People want to converse at the same
rate as they would in a normal conversation.

Sally: gr8 :)

2) Culture. 
   Groups of people not willing or resisting to learn any language.
Think about this next time that you are watching tv. MTV has more
influence on the youth of America than some would like to admit.

Somebody: Shnizzile nizzle dog.(This is closer to slang.)
Somebody else: I ax you where the soap.

There are some groups in in effort to keep their cultural heritage are
hamstringing their kids. "I want my kids to know [insert here]."

3) The schools. (Sorry Roger, Rita.)
   What more can I say. At least with the Aurora Public Schools my
experience has been sub par. It seems that in an effort to get the
schools to do better they are willing to label students. Well we cant
get all the kids up to a national level so we will "cull" them for the
best students. 

In ending. We may be seeing the second renaissance of the English
language. When Shakespeare was writing he was inventing words. Some we
still use and some we don't. The internet is moving ideas at a pace not
seen since the invention of the printing press. 

Jef

On Wed, 2003-09-24 at 21:27, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 14:00, Jeff Cann wrote:
> > On Tuesday 23 September 2003 9:12 am, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:
> > > It's only a matter of time before we devolve back to communicating in
> > > pictograms anyway....
> > 
> > You sound so Orwellian today, Joe.  I'm feeling double plus good about the 
> > changes to our language.
> 
> I'm uneasy about the direction our language is taking, but I also know
> that plenty of people were made uneasy by writing and the printing
> press, so... it's kind of hard to predict whether a shift to pictograms
> would be a bad thing or not.
> 
> On the one hand, we tend to process images more easily than text
> anyway... but on the other hand, it's much more difficult to convey
> abstract concepts using images than it is using words. 
> 
> > On a serious note, I do know that languages are ephemeral, so we don't have 
> > much to do about it.  I'm still pissed about the acceptance of the word 
> > "ain't" and people who use 'who' as a preposition (instead of whom).
> 
> "Ain't" doesn't bother me... if it was good enough for Mark Twain, it's
> good enough for me. There are plenty of other little things that drive
> me nuts, though -- like people using "over" and "under" to mean "more
> than" or "less than" or the fact that very, very few people seem to
> understand the difference between "its" and "it's." 
> 
> Zonker
> -- 
> Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
> jzb at dissociatedpress.net
> Aim: zonkerjoe
> http://www.dissociatedpress.net
> 
> _______________________________________________
> CLUE-Talk mailing list
> Post messages to: CLUE-Talk at clue.denver.co.us
> Unsubscribe or manage your options: http://clue.denver.co.us/mailman/listinfo/clue-talk
>