Wots Wrong Wiv Speakin English?

 Over the last couple of hundred years, the way in which we use the English language has changed. So much so, that most of the world struggles to understand the beauty of William Shakespeare’s magical writing. This has become so alien to us, that even National Curriculum English when I was at school, had us dissecting Macbeth to find out what on earth he was talking about!!!

 Presently, Technology has overtaken the world. Its a truly amazing thing! Email has given us back family, that  moved across the world. Social networking has re-introduced us to many friends whose lives we had fallen out of for many years, and some people that to be honest weren’t ever friends in the first place! We can now see our photos instantly, and upload them for the world to comment on, in a matter of minutes. Long gone are the days of waiting a week and being horrified at a whole reel of over exposed double chins and chopped off heads.

 One thing about this new Era that concerns me… Wots wrong wiv speakin English?!!! As mentioned above, I too am riding the glorious wave that is the techno train. Who can walk past the PC without a cheeky check of facebook?  I can completely understand using a little shorthand for a quick text. What I really don’t understand is why some of the new “txt language” words are infact longer than their perfectly usable old ones!!! Or why this lazy illiterate form of writing is creeping into emails, status updates and instant chats? I don’t want to have to translate what people are talking about thanks (thanx) very much. I sure as hell don’t believe they are LOL ing as much as they say they are.

 I hadn’t really realised how much it was affecting me until recently. I was looking at a friends new song on youtube, and noticed a rather aggressive comment about his work, I was stunned by this persons lack of ability to reproduce a single word correctly, and assumed that they were poorly educated. When I commented words to that effect, I was told “hav u never herd of txt language? U ANCIENT FREAK!! lol” and “maybie u shud start learning txt language b4 sum one starts to use tht language against u!!! I was truly mortified, (and not just because i’m only 30) but if what this person implies is true, can we really expect to hire people based on a CV written in this way? Will corporations be sending out business proposals in this format? Will supermarket employees have badges saying “Cn I help U” . More importantly, will children of a future generation, be picking apart the scripts of modern writers to find out “Wot thay r goin on abat?!!!”

Image via Wikipedia

Tanith Harding