polyglot conspiracy

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.]