polyglot conspiracy

A Slashdot post about email’s usage in Korea has led to a fascinating thread on people’s perceptions and uses of IM vs. email. The original post refers to this article about how SMS, IM, and other ICTs are replacing email as a preferred means of communication in Korea:

[T]he stronghold of email, once the favorite of the Internet, is being shaken from its roots.

The ebbing of email is a phenomenon peculiar to Korea, an IT power. Leading the big change, unprecedented in the world, are our teens and those in their 20’s. The perception that “email is an old and formal communication means” is rapidly spreading among them. “I use email when I send messages to elders,” said a college student by the name of Park. For 22-year-old office worker Kim, “I use email only for receiving cellphone and credit card invoices.”

This is also the case in the US; I did some research among college students a couple of years ago and was surprised to hear them talking about how ineffective email was, how much it was reserved for “instrumental” uses and task-driven communication. Because I’ve tended to use email for personal social purposes as well as business-type ones, this finding shocked me. But it makes sense, and I think it’s probably becoming clear now that email was never the “preferred online mode of communication;” it was just the first widespread one-to-one mode. Now that people have other options, they’re using them, particularly IM. In some offices, even email acts like IM through instantaneous programs like Outlook. I’ll be examining the rest of the thread in more detail to tease out the more enlightening posts.

A few weeks ago 20/20 ran a brief piece on “The E-Mail Code.” It includes footage of a teenager using IM and a 20/20 anchor trying to “decipher” the “code,” Naomi Baron of American University talking about the etiquette of CMC, and Lynne Truss, of Eats, Shoots & Leaves fame, discussing the downfall of English due to electronic communication.

First comes the inevitable vitriol at watching a mainstream news outlet cover anything: the perky voice of the anchor, the circus-sounding background music, the pretension of authority, the lack of nuance. Then comes the vitriol at watching a mainstream news outlet cover a topic so dear to me. They talk about the “little messages” that teenagers are pecking out, “little messages most of us can’t read.” The reporter Lynn Sherr says:

It looks like an alien language. It sounds very important. It’s consuming our kids and ourselves, as it elevates our thumbs to new digital equality. It’s instant messaging, or IM, the teens’ favored tool. Text messaging, the shortened slang of cell phones. And grown-up friendly e-mail.

Baron talks about how knowing the code is a mark of coolness for teenagers, a demonstration of knowledge of the in-group vernacular. But I know plenty of adults who use IM, and I know plenty of adults whose IM language is laden with abbreviations, acronyms, and even emoticons. This is not just a teen thing, and if they had bothered to look at recent statistics on IM usage, maybe the broadcast wouldn’t have come out sounding so condescending. “Look at this silly little thing the teens are using, isn’t that sweet?”

But then it turns serious, and more seriously irksome:

LYNNE TRUSS: It’s a new form of English. It’s somewhere between talking and writing.
LYNN SHERR (Voice Over): Which spells big trouble, says author Lynne Truss. In her best-seller, “Eats Shoots & Leaves,” she frets that people have forgotten about punctuation and that e-mail and IM are ruining the English language. She calls it web-lish.
LYNNE TRUSS: What I feel when I read something that’s written all in lower case is that I’m reading something written by a 5-year-old child. And when you see a load of capitals in front, you know someone’s shouting.
LYNN SHERR: (Voice Over) And those little sideways smiley faces, emoticons, a poor substitute for words.
LYNN SHERR: (Off Camera) Isn’t that just the 21st century semicolon?
LYNNE TRUSS: No, it’s an ornament, but it doesn’t do anything to help you with the secrets of words.

Emoticons are not the 21st century semicolon, but that’s because they express completely different things. I’m not fond of emoticons, but one has to admit that they do, in theory, serve to show things that other orthographical tools don’t, at least not in such a succinct package. The “secrets of words”? I didn’t know that words had things to hide which are better discovered through punctuation than through context or a quick dictionary check. Has Truss ever looked at real IM conversations? They’re full of expression and gradation; the tools for them are simply different. If you want to talk about punctuation, think about what punctuation really is, what it really does: it accentuates, it emphasizes. It may be done in nontraditional ways in IM and email, the old marks may be used for new purposes, but it is certainly done. And as long as we have written prose, we’ll likely have a standard prose style that resists undue influence from this derelict Weblish (and even if we don’t, must I really mention the infamous “mutability of language,” the recentness of orthographic standards, the cultural relativity of print’s esteem?).

Her statement that “it’s a new form of English,” and the fact that she’s even given it a name, don’t quite jibe with her disdain for it. If it’s “somewhere between talking and writing,” how could we expect or ask it to obey the conventions of either? You don’t need a lot of the punctuation in IM that you need in more staid written forms. Part of this is because IM sounds more like speech, and part of it is because of IM’s features. Instead of using a comma or a semicolon, you take a new turn. Instead of a whole question word, you simply use a question mark. Instead of a meaningless exclamatory word, required as part of reacting to an interlocutor’s comment (wow, oh, shit), you use the exclamation mark itself. Like any speaking or writing, using IM or email represents a negotiation of concepts and meta-concepts, a filtering out of the unnecessary and a reconfiguring of the essential to approximate, as closely as possible, your thoughts.

The most enlightened portion of the broadcast comes with the teenager Hillary’s rebuff to these accusations, saying that she knows the difference between Weblish and English. Hillary says:

We’re not using this to ruin it. We’re just using it because it works for us. It’s AOL, like, slang, that’s what it is.

The kids are all right.

One last thing: The lack of clarity and logic in language might well be real, but Truss is blaming straw men. If we have gone to “sloppy” writing without “precision,” I don’t believe it to be the fault of (or even necessarily evidenced in) lackadaisical punctuation or IM abbreviations. A real issue - and a far more interesting one - is of commitment to our language, which is to say commitment to, and confidence in, our thoughts. Witness the rise of quotative and plain old hedging like, the rampant use of “I feel like…” instead of “I think that…”, an insistence on scare quotes (or airquotes). We seem scared to be opinionated, or at least consistently unsure of ourselves. Like how I just wrote “we seem” instead of “we are”: I’m telling you to be certain that I’m not certain, these are only my personal observations, I don’t even really know if its true or not this is only anecdotal evidence i just hear some people say some things and this is what it seems they mean to me only to me i dont want you to take this as fact there are no facts… Of course, when one does get firm with one’s thoughts, one invites backlash, which is perhaps why one is reluctant to do so.

All of which is to say: It may be tough having an “inner stickler” in this world, but it might be even tougher having an inner descriptivist.

[Note 1: While you'll find me Grammar Jackaling and MangledWordMongering occasionally on this blog, I am, at the end of the day, simply trying to get to the bottom of what happens, why, and what it really means. Any apparent air of better-than-thou-ness ought to be interpreted as sarcastic at worst, helpful at best, and always, always playful.]

[Note 2: No, I haven't read Truss's book. I'd planned to, but after rummaging around for some reviews, I've decided it might be psychically better for me to abstain.]

I already heart the radio show The Next Big Thing, and now even moreso: I just discovered its fun series (and a great contributor long overdue to be known to me) Use It or Lose It, wherein “activist lexicographer” Erin McKean

gets poor unsuspecting writers to use words that are either on the brink of extinction or else needing a little help so that they can make it into the dictionary.

In Part I, Dan Savage was charged with incorporating lovertine (one addicted to lovemaking), esprise (inflamed with love), kakistocracy (a government run by its worst citizens).

In Part II, Donald Westlake successfully used blat (newspaper), hawasim (thief), acheiropoietoi (images not made by human hands).

Needless to say, I want Erin McKean’s job.

[Also, did people know that the word mullet comes from a kind of fish? I am ashamed that I did not ([know where the word mullet came from] not [come from a kind of fish]). Thankfully, The Next Big Thing is all over that for me, too.]

In more news on impassioned wordsmithery, the NYT has a piece about a lake in central Massachusetts whose name no one can spell properly, much less pronounce: Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. Apparently, the downfall of the lake’s name is but a hint of worse things to come for its community. Along with the name’s downgrade to “Webster Lake” (couldn’t they just have shortened it to “Chargogg” or even “Chargo”?), an influx of vacationers, and some richies erecting rooms-with-views, there’s environmental damage to contend with:

These days, the lake’s homeowners, through the Webster Lake Association, are battling another consequence of modernity: environmental fallout, including contaminated water runoff and rapacious water weeds…

Still, not everything is changing. Everyone knows a Webster Lake will never have the je ne sais quoi (or the je ne peux pas le prononcer) of a Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.

“There’s some things in life that ought to be able to live in exaggeration,” Mr. Cazeault said.

And if we don’t let our words “live in exaggeration,” what will?

This feature in the NYT talks about some celebrities’ gadgetry wish lists. But the tagline on the front page of Circuits strikes me as very strange:

They may be well-known but that doesn’t mean they don’t love gadgets. What do Michael Stipe, Aimee Mann and Ken Jennings want this holiday season?

Since when are gadgets reserved for people who are not well-known? A gadget is:

an often small mechanical or electronic device with a practical use but often thought of as a novelty

And more and more, gadgets are too expensive for anyone BUT well-known people to own. No sense, NYT. No sense.

[Just for fun, in a Googlefight, "celebrity gadget" beat "commoner gadget"by quite a bit. As did "celebrities love gadgets" beat "celebrities hate gadgets."]

Genealogy - Life in the Past Lane

Cute. Very cute.

I believe these three can be conflated into one entry quite appropriately:

Rehab is for quitters

I’m cheaper than a DUI

One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floor

Did I hear someone say “Taxi drivers have a vested interest in wastoid college students”?

The NYT is reporting on the military building its “own Internet” for operations:

This “Internet in the sky,” Peter Teets, under secretary of the Air Force, told Congress, would allow “marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request imagery” from a spy satellite, and “get it downloaded within seconds.”

The internet is so about to be seriously pluralized.

An addendum to my post about theme restaurants being “just another kind of infotainment”:

I just saw that this word was added to the OED in June:

eatertainment: n., U.S….An experience which combines eating with entertainment; spec. the sector of the restaurant industry comprising restaurant chains based on an entertainment theme, such as sport, music, or film.

It makes sense, but I’ve never heard anyone say it.

Heard on BBC Radio just now:

“The death of Yasir Arafat came just as British Prime Minister Tony Blair was flying to the United States to meet with the newly erected - uh - newly elected president George W. Bush…”

Well well well. Have we got a secret British Monica Lewinsky on our hands?

So just when I’m sitting here contemplating certain disadvantages cell phone users incur during a night out on the town, I see this post by Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing about the new Nokia club phone. Other than these tantalizing features:

Shrouded in the mystery is a passion that will only reveal itself as you slide it open. Its sublime form is exquisitely crafted, leaving you with a slim, sleek object of beauty, unmatched by any other. You and the Nokia 7280 phone, a combination that’s as compelling as the night.

the phone also has going for it a “unique design exuding mystery,” the quality of “standing out like a flame in the darkness,” and downloads to “refresh your soul.”

Wow. There’s a lot going on there. There’s the hidden VGA camera, the ability to switch your data from your “day phone” to your “night phone,” video streaming, audio clip saving, text messaging and voice messaging, and it’s “crafted for glamour” to boot. Something about me really, really wants this phone. I usually don’t care about material things like phones, but let’s face it: my phone can shroud me in mystery? My phone can refresh my soul? And above all, my phone can fit slimly into my pocket without that annoying bulge that so often plagues me while I’m trying to bust a move? I’m in.

And yet…there’s one thing even this high-tech, specialized phone doesn’t quite offer that clubgoers are desperately in need of. That guy I gave my phone number to last night, he put my name and number into his cell phone. But what if he doesn’t remember that he put my name and number in his cell phone? What if he doesn’t remember he met me at all? This has happened to all of us at some point, let’s be honest. So people talk a lot about how handy it is that everyone has cell phones now, and this is great for the bar scene because you can just whip it out at any time to get down a number (or a picture, for that matter), and it’s safely and soundly kept for your later reference. But…unlike a napkin or a piece of paper, which you might find the next day when cleaning out your pockets, or when pulling money out of your wallet, there’s nothing to make you remember that you actually got the number. How often do you actually go through the phone book in your cell phone on a regular basis to see what’s new? If you forget that you got a number, you might not find that number for days, weeks, MONTHS until you actually need to go through your phone book to call someone you rarely call, and you notice a mysterious name you have no recollection of. Maybe you don’t really care if you forget that person, but if there’s even a chance that you’re interested in them, you want to at least be reminded to evaluate the situation the next day. And that’s where your cell phone should come in.

All cell phones should provide a Morning After Alert, which notifies you tomorrow that you got a number tonight. Phone book entries would have special fields for “remind me tomorrow” that you can check when you’re entering the new number. If you’re merely taking down the number out of courtesy, don’t check the box–but if you’re interested, and know that you’re not in the best form, check the box, and let your phone do the work tomorrow. This would also help with the whole name-remembering thing that so many people have trouble with: what if you don’t remember the name but know you got a new number, but the name you have is also the same as other names in your phone book that you rarely call (so you don’t know whose number is whose)? Problem solved–phone tells you name AND number (and picture, I guess, if you can sneak-attack your way to that).

[Semantic note: When I first saw Doctorow's headline about the new "clubbing phone" and the picture of the rectangular black object, I really thought this meant "club" as in "police club," wherein the phone would double as a functional weapon. This, too, would make an excellent special-feature cell phone, with loads of marketing possibilities. ]

UPDATE: Virgin is releasing a new cell phone feature to help prevent drunkdials. A step in the right direction, Technology! (Thanks to the folks at Metafilter.)