You know, I love being old -you get to learn so many things. For example, I found out that you should probably not admit you’re old at parties because it leaves you open to stuff, and not all of it is nice. Personally, I go in disguise, although we all have to find the door we fit through, eh? But, let’s face it, most elders don’t get invited out much anyway, so except for maybe the occasional funeral, we don’t have to say anything about our ages.
Unfortunately, camouflage doesn’t seem to work for me online. For some reason, everybody knows I’m not one of them. At first, I thought maybe it was because I spelled words correctly and used punctuation. I capitalized the first letter in a sentence, and so everybody could be sure my thought was completed, ended with a period. It was when I decided to text my son instead of Emailing him, that he responded with a chastisement to put me straight.
“Ur gonna get trolled if u keep writing SAs dad everybodyl no” Well, it looked sort of like that, but I can never remember his abbreviations. At any rate, I was being warned about the rules. It was some time around then that I ran across a semi-explanatory article online in the BBC culture section, discussing LIVE (Live Internet Vernacular English): http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180618-will-we-stop-speaking-and-just-text
I’d obviously never heard of it, but I’m learning that there’s a lot out there that nobody thinks to tell us. Well, not us, at any rate. ‘Texting may be closer to speech than formal written language. […] in its loosely structured live interactivity, internet slang […] is closer to speech than text. But it has its own conventions, some of which defy saying out loud. It’s a substitute for speech.’
Let’s take a step back for a moment. ‘Written language was created to give a record of spoken language. Not that written language is just the frozen form of speech. Over the centuries, it has gained features such as exclamation marks and italics to convey spoken features such as tone, but it has also evolved to convey things that speech doesn’t: the etymological traces carried by our spelling, the structure of thought conveyed by paragraphs, the aesthetics of fonts and other design elements. […] But live internet text is something new. When we tweet or send text messages, we are merging the fixed visual means of text with the immediate live performance of speech. It is as vernacular as speech, and it draws on vernacular speech.’
A while ago, I discovered emoticons and emojis at the bottom of my phone’s keyboard, and so I started using them -apparently incorrectly. I tried the yellow circle one with the straight mouth and the two eye-dots on my son in response to a text he’d sent me. I meant it as a sort of noncommittal shrug, but he thought I was upset with him. I wish I’d seen the article first. ‘Several studies have found that their [emoticons and emoji] primary use is not to present the speaker’s emotion but to help smooth out interpersonal relationships and to convey features such as irony. They are not about how the sender feels so much as how the sender wants the receiver to feel.’ Who knew?
As I sank deeper into the interstices of the article, I began to see how somebody writing like I do might be easy pickings for a troll. ‘Live is like a sci-fi story where people’s tongues and vocal cords have been replaced by keyboards and screens, and they have to learn to work with the potentials and constraints of their new anatomy. You don’t have volume, pitch, rhythm or speed, so what do you do? Skip using the Shift key and punctuation to show haste (sorry cant chat rn got an essay due) or casualness (hi whats up). Make a typographical error to show urgency or heedlessness – teh (for the), pwn (for own, as in dominate or defeat), zomg (for OMG because Z is next to Shift), and hodl(for hold in online currency trading); these all originated with errors but became fixed forms that are simultaneously more intense and more facetious than the originals.’
And yet, as I’m sure my Grade 12 English teacher would have signalled with her eyebrows, LIVE merely seems to be an excuse for sloppiness, although a proper linguist might have an opinion closer to that of James Harbeck, the article’s author: ‘But it’s all language, and language is always a performance that refers back to previous performances and helps show what you know and what group you belong to. Live is an idiom of a certain social set – or, by now, several different social sets.’ In fact, it seems to me that LIVE is a hybrid -almost a pidgin, a form of communication between people -especially elders, perhaps- not sharing a common language.
‘Live is affecting other forms of English, spoken and written, because we borrow from it and refer to it. Some Live is just not sayable, but you can hear people say “L O L” and you can see emoji in ads. Is it slipping into formal writing by younger people as they grow up using it and become adults? Studies have shown that it’s not. They learn how to write like grown-ups when they have to, just as we all have: we don’t use the slang we learned as kids in our annual reports.’
I have to try to remain open to change, I realize; I have to learn to give Youth and their technology a chance –‘When in Rome…’ as the old aphorism goes. But, as interesting as LIVE may be, and as pragmatically as it may function, I still can’t bring myself to strip the skin off words or destroy the surprise of a beautiful homonymic metaphor with the bones of a skeleton. But perhaps that’s what my son was hinting at when he told me to stop treating texts as essays -sorry, ‘SAs’. I suppose we don’t expect poetry in a phone conversation either, do we? And yet… and yet wouldn’t that be a gift?
