While the sentence “is the greatest way to render narrative,” Librarian of Congress James Billington tells the Washington Post, “We are moving toward the language used by computer programmers and air traffic controllers,” he says. “Language as a method of instruction, not a portal into critical thinking.”
Of course, he is right. Aside from commands, the ability of ordinary people to speak or write clearly and concisely is fading away. If you doubt me, ask a recent college graduate to show you her blog or a memo she wrote for her boss.
Even commands contain a certain inarticulateness. Amtrak commands that you “take all of your personal belongings with you as you exit the train.” Really? Am I to leave my impersonal belongings behind? Why use the word personal in that sentence at all?
In the same article, a professor blames the Internet. Yes, millions are reading billions of lines of unedited prose.
But is the Internet itself to blame or is it a mirror reflecting a national image of poor grammar? I suspect if one could open a representative sample of private letters, the quality of writing would be little better.
Its true that computers have allowed time to be used much more efficiently. However, there is an even bigger force at work here. Since people are looking to cram more things into their days, anything that increases efficiency, and money earned as a result, is welcomed. Husband and wife both work and pay a nanny–why? Because its cheaper to pay an outsider (who’s time is obviously not worth as much as either spouse’s) to raise our next generation rather than losing a whole income in doing it ourselves. Our life philosophy is about doing things as quickly as possible. The computer plays into it as a tool, it even allows this process to acceleerate or compound, but the computer itself is not the primary culprit. It does have a large role in destroying our language, but that we allow that role to occur is the actual problem.
The same system dictates to us that equity in our homes is an ineffficient money-managment “scam” and we need to get a loan, write-off the interest, and make our money work for someone else’s sub-prime mortgage.
I would argue that formalities are being dropped in every aspet of life, since formalities take time. Whereas in the past, protocol would dictate a follow-up letter in the mail, you are now lucky if you receive several sentence fragments in an e-mail or text message–but proponents would say at least “you received it two seconds after transmission.” I would reply, “what purpose did it serve if it was ambigious to the point that it introduced numerous new questions?”
Another formality that is being dropped is in the realm of clothing, though there are some other influences here also. People do not wear suits anymore. The garb of choice is far less formal, less time-consuming to put on and does not require going home to change clothes for other events. At some point, it became acceptable, even appropriate, to meet people without wearing your suit coat (i.e. just your shirt and tie), then a button-down shirts with no tie, then a golf shitrt and khakis, a shirt of some sort with jeans, now you even sometimes see someone in a t-shirt and jeans!
When those stages of informality were reached, that professionals were wearing jeans (as an example but you can pick your own milestone), suddenly professionals were wearing the same clothes as the less educated, less fortunate indivudals among our civilized population (let’s call them the “peasants” of our society), and those peasants then became our trend-setters. It became fashionable to wear ripped up jeans, ragged looking clothing. We even buy clothing that is, at best, “no-iron” so we can save time, but our obsession with saving time now requires pre-ripped, pre-worn, pre-washed, so we don’t have to spend time destroying our clothes. Our trendsetters, with their actually worn-out ripped-up soiled clothing, instead of working to buy nice clothes themselves and enter our arena, have made us compete on their turf.
We even pick-up our peasant-trendsetters’ linguistic corruptions, saving them the trouble of edcating themselves by “dumbifying” (how’s that for a corruption) ourselves, and integrate those corruptions into propper English. We print the verb (formerly a mere prefix) “to dis” in world-class magazines, as an example. There are many other examples of this occuring.
The disassembly of civilization is completely self-imposed. Our civiliazation is reverting back to barbarism. However, the computer itself is only a tool in this process–not the exact cause of it. We have to open the door first. Our desire to use less time to do more allows the computer user’s sentence fragments to permeate into the English language, but we are also destroying our clothing fashion, which is another symbol of civilization, and allowing the less-eduacted elements of society to further corrupt our language. When we lowered our style of dress to that of the peasants of civilization, we justified them by wearing their clothes, and accepted their further corruption into our language.
Since they’re members of a profession defined by the use (and, often, the intentional abuse) of language, you might think lawyers would be less prone to this sort of thing. But as the recorded voice on the Virginia State Bar’s phone line recently informed me, the governing body of that Commonwealth’s attorneys has agents who will “answer your call in the order it was received.”