English Grammar and Spelling

[Heckler]

Heh. If I ever get back into MMO's I'm going to do whatever it takes to use only the most proper English whilst fragging my enemies.

You know what bugs me? When people ask questions like "what does pwned/1337/etc mean?" on the Internet. You're on the Internet, mang.
Look it up.

Nareau

What does "mang" mean?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Meng the Merciless was teh enemy of Flash Gordon.

 

[wingsandsword]

Let me be the first to put down that L33t speech have made its way into the classrooms and teachers have been forced to accept them due to the "changing times".

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I heard that on the news...

Do you have a source for that? What I had heard and seen indicated that while students were trying to use leet/txt speech and getting roundly flunked for it.

Back in the Spring I was back in college full-time, and I ended up having to take a 100-level normally freshman class. I thought it was interesting to see that the syllabus had a note that using leetspeak/txt shorthand in any term paper was grounds to immediately fail the paper.

A friend of mine who is a High School U.S. History teacher said that his school has a firm policy about banning leetspeak.

I'd imagine this to be a district-by-district, school by school issue. Some would probably accept it under the banner of "multiculturalism" (although web culture as a culture needing protection seems odd).

You could argue that leetspeak/txt is a valid, albeit strange dialect of English, but one so mutually incomprehensible from standard English (and not one automatically spoken by all students) that a common language should be used by all students, educators and administrators to ensure clear communication, and that language would be Standard English.

Allowing them to write their school papers in leet and txt shorthand is setting them up for failure when they enter the workplace and try to communicate professionally with something so incomprehensible.

 

[bodhi]

You could argue that leetspeak/txt is a valid, albeit strange dialect of English, but one so mutually incomprehensible from standard English (and not one automatically spoken by all students) that a common language should be used by all students, educators and administrators to ensure clear communication, and that language would be Standard English.

Assuming the school teaches in Standard English, teachers should accept papers, essays, or any homework only in Standard English (apart from foreign language classes, which should accept submissions in the language taught in the class). There's a format to follow in school. If you choose not to follow it, you take your chances.

That being said, I could see leet/txt being used within the context of quoting: he said, and I quote, "3y3 4m 1337! g1v3 m3 \/\/4/-3z D00D!!!one". Or, being used deliberately as the voice of the narrator. White Wolf's WoD stuff often presented fluff as "discovered" documents, or as a narrative from one in-world character to another, so it's appropriate to have stuff that you wouldn't accept in a textbook.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I am a linguist and a teacher of English. As a linguist, my training leads me toward descriptivism, rather than proscriptivism. That is, I am trained to observe the language people use, not to tell them what language they should use. As an English teacher, I cringe when my fellow ENworlders (who are, on the whole, highly literate) use badwrong language. It is my job to correct the language use of twelve-year-olds, but I believe that it is rude to call people on their language use in a discussion thread on any other topic.

You know, it's actually starting to drive me a little batty that I must constantly restrain myself from correcting the grammar, spelling, and punctuation of posts all over these boards. I think it's getting worse. I don't remember seeing such a plague of illiteracy back when I first joined. I actually came to Off-Topic to post a thread exactly like this one, in which I blow off steam about the terrible language use on the boards. I'm happy to see I'm not the only one who grits his teeth every time he sees someone butcher the language.

Buy a freaking dictionary, people!

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

What's truly sad is that the growing frequency of this sort of thing can be traced, at least in part, to the fact that fewer people are reading regularly. Very often, as you touched on, this sort of thing happens because people hear a word or expression over and over, but they've never seen it used in writing. Thus, when they do eventually have to write it--or edit someone else's writing that includes it--they fall back on what they think they heard.

It's where you get the previous example of "should of." People hear "should've," think they heard "should of," and assume that the latter is proper.

In many cases (such as your own example of "hone" vs. "home"), even people who haven't seen it in writing might realize their interpretation is wrong if they just bother to think about it for a moment. But they're so used to hearing it used (or thinking they've heard it used) that they don't even bother doing that.

Why, in the name of all that is holy, do people not reflect on the meaning of their colloquialisms? I do it all the time. Heck, I do it with regular words. I'm always trying to plumb the etymology of my vocabulary, because it's fun to understand why my words mean what they do. Often, you can figure out how to spell a particular use of a word you've heard just by deducing the most reasonable word to fit the sounds, given the context in which it appears. Hone in, indeed.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I believe the world you are looking for is elite. The origin of " 1337 " speak is tied up in the origin of hardcore and professional (multiplayer video) gaming, I believe.

Actually, it's from the hacker community. It's harder to automatically monitor chat room dialogues when the participants are deliberately spelling their words in ways that, to a computer, don't resemble the original words, and are difficult for a human to figure out if he's not already familiar with the practice. It's the same principle as thieves' cant: "cheeze it! It's the fuzz!" It's a jargon language that allows communication between people who don't want eavesdroppers.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I wouldn't say it's as effective. Without your translation, I wouldn't have known what that meant. I would have plugged for "the baby has returned".

Well, his translation is incorrect anyway. The "baby" referred to translates to "the woman with whom I have a casually flirtatious and/or sexual relationship". Sir Mix-A-Lot may be a lot of things, but he is no pedophile.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

As for the actual thread topic... er, yeah. Whatever, d00d, LOL. WTF?

Maybe you should keep your concern for the purity of the English language in your class full of 12-year olds where it belongs. As for being a linguist, I'm not sure what you mean by that. I'm not a practicing professional linguist, but linguistics has been a hobby of mine for some time, and I gotta tell you, the first thing any linguist worth his salt will tell you is that languages change. Static, "fossilized" language is completely unnatural and contrary to human nature, so actively trying to enforce that in a venue where adherence to strict grammer and spelling conventions is of no particular importance is a quixotic endeavor, to say the least.

And the purity of the English language is a myth anyway. I could just as easily complain about the prevalence of the Great Vowel Shift, or the influx of all these freaky French and Norse words, for example, as I could about the more recent rise of 1337 speak. And all three of those complaints would be equally futile.

So, are you trying to say we should abandon the teaching and enforcement of proper grammar and spelling simply because there is a tendency for languages to change over time? I regularly grade university-level papers, and I have noticed a link between literacy and ability to express (or even form) ideas. I don't think that such a course of action would create positive results for discourse.

It seems more productive to acknowledge that language will evolve over time, but constantly try to hold everyone to what is necessarily a changing standard. Don't give up on proper spelling, but allow that over the course of a century (not a weekend) the spelling of a word may change. Until then, it's incorrect and should be corrected. There's a difference between illiteracy and evolution. If you misspell a word because you are ignorant, it's a different situation than if you use a new word which is a corruption of a pre-existing word. While TXTing may have its place on a screen that can display only a few dozen characters, there's no reason to allow it to bleed over into regular literate discourse.

edit: Still waiting for a merge function.

 

[Nifft]

You know, it's actually starting to drive me a little batty that I must constantly restrain myself from correcting the grammar, spelling, and punctuation of posts all over these boards. I think it's getting worse.

Someone pointed out to me that it probably is worse... because it is summer.

None the less, why restrain yourself? So long as you aren't insulting, you are probably actually helping the poster, who may be an non-native speaker, or who may be simply ill-educated (regarding the language in general, or the local culture on this board).

Cheers, -- N