Technology has a lot to answer for. It's an unproven scientific fact that every eight seconds a better version of something I already own is unveiled, making me look as old and doddery as Bruce Forsyth trying to read an autocue. If technology was any more humiliating it would bend us all over and have Charlie Sheen snort cocaine off our backsides. Which he would never do, of course. Allegedly.
What's more infuriating is that the only difference between the iSuperNewThing 5000 and your crappy old excuse for a gadget, which may as well be a fridge from the 70s now, is probably that they've put a camera on the letter ?M'. But seeing as we're all effectively just magpies-in-jeans we'll collect these shiny new objects anyway and take them back to our nests and feed worms to them. That's what I do at least. You don't do that? You're a weirdo.
The iPad2 will soon be thrust upon us. This is particularly exasperating to me, an original iPad owner, as I've only just stopped receiving condescending glares from judgemental commuters who assumed I had queued up at the Apple Store on release day. If that wasn't enough there's a third version of the iPad expected later this year and just about every company in existence seems determined to help us overdose on tablets. Do we really need all this new technology rammed down our throats, guilt-tripping us into ?not getting left behind'? All we use these devices for is to look at cats or videos of laughing babies anyway. (You think I'm joking, a video of a baby laughing was the most popular story on Yahoo! UK two weeks ago. See what I'm up against?)
Anyway, all this self-indulgent keyboard slapping has actually been an introduction to what this article is really about. This bit coming up. Now. Two weeks ago I was involved in a heated discussion with a freelance journalist friend of mine. She believes that these rapid advancements in technology are leading us into a downward spiral of talking like imbeciles. LOL, right? It turns out that these are just the sort of lexical spasms that get her - and many others - worked up. ?Our language is being bastardised!' is the usual cry.
It was the invention of mobile phones paired with idle minds and lazy thumbs which saw initialisation of phrases seep into the mainstream. ?OMG', ?ROFL' and ?WTF' are all phrases that were pole-vaulted into popularity by texters and permanently planted there by sites like Twitter where you're limited to using just 140 characters and actually encouraged to communicate like an outpatient.
Inevitably this has started to sneak into people's verbal lexicon too, particularly those dastardly teenagers. I was in a shop recently (true story) when a young girl said ?poss' to me. Assuming she had short-circuited like Johnny 5 I waited for her to finish. But no, she was done. Saying ?possibly' had proved too much of a handful. It is polysyllabic after all.
I understand why people hate the change in language; I'm right there on the picket lines with them. It can be infuriating hearing youngsters morph our language into something resembling Mork and Mindy's vocabulary but the main reason we don't like it is because generally we hate change. Chaucer was chastised in the 14th century for ?ruining' the English language and look at him now. Who knows, perhaps one day we will see an array of Nokia phones buried alongside him in Westminster Abbey accompanied by the scribblings ?Tracy woz ere'.
The English language is evolving, and while we may not like it, we're going to have to lump it. We're helpless, just like every other generation who huffed and puffed as their language changed b4 their eyes.
Chat about this story w/ Talkita
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