No1curr about ampersands?
Feb. 25th, 2011 04:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinTake a look at this:
See that?
You're looking at the future.
But you're not just looking at any future, you're looking at one of those chilling dystopian types where the laws of civilization have been thrown out the window and anarchy reigns. Why? Because when you look at the symbol "&", you are looking at a world where such abomination as "leetspeak", "chatspeak", and "lolcat" can become accepted as a standard part of formal English.
To understand the future, we have to go back into the past. By the end of the 18th century, English-speaking schoolchildren were reciting their alphabets with a few flourishes that would strike us as odd. For one thing, they included the ligature for "and"--that symbol above--at the end of the list. For another thing, they attached the Latin phrase "per se" (essentially, "in itself") to any item in the recitation that could stand as a word. This included such notable vowels as A and I, and of course it included the ligature.
So the early 19th century recitation of the alphabet didn't end "X, Y, and Z."
No, it went "X, Y, Z, and per se and."
Do you see where this is going? The name we give that funny squiggly mark has no proper basis, it's just a product of one too many rote recitations being slurred, misremembered, or misunderstood.
And-per se-and.
Ampersand.
And now it's part of our language. And that mark? I called it a ligature. That's something we don't really do in American English. It's two letters written as a single glyph. When you see someone using British English typing "foetus" or an archaic spelling like "aeon" (as in the cartoon that was never adapted into a movie, Aeon Flux), you're witnessing an odd linguistic twist where two separate letters are being used to approximate a ligature that itself replaced the separate letters. The actual spelling would be "fœtus" or "æon".
The history of ligatures' rising and falling fortunes follows the history of writing technology. In the earliest forms of writing, they just sort of happened because some symbols tended to run into each other. Scribes copying books out by hand developed them intentionally as shortcuts. They survived the earliest forms of mass printing, but the more things trended towards standardization and mass production, the more superfluous all these special characters seemed to be. What was once a great saver of time became a bit of a needless expense.
Ligatures can be kind of a big deal in some languages but nowadays even in British English ligatures are often used just for stylistic flourishes (again, as in the title of the aforementioned cartoons), but & remains.
Those of you who aren't familiar with this history and don't know enough about language to fill in the gaps are probably wondering exactly what two letters "&" is supposed to be. Even if I tell you, you'll have to turn your head and squint a little to see them... it's sort of gone through multiple generations of flourishes.
The letters, though, are E and t.
Et.
Latin for "and", naturally.
To make a long story short*, we have in current use in the English language a symbol that we read as "and", that we give a name that has all the dignity and etymological standing of "pasghetti", and that we represent as a scribbled version of the same word in a different language.
I submit to you that a hundred internets operating for a couple of months (this is a hundred years, in internet time) could not come up with a linguistic convention more ridiculous than the simple ampersand... and yet no one looks at it askance when it shows up in the names of old and venerable corporations like AT&T, on the letterheads of respectable law firms, in published legal documents or even the bodies of laws themselves.
The future is here, in other words... the future where chatspeak has become accepted. And it's not just the &.
Computer programs designed for the very professionaliest of professional applications will still tell its users to click "OK" to continue, even though "OK" is a newspaper in-joke from the days when media itself was new media. It's an abbreviation for "oll korrect" (all correct). What can the modern era haz that compares to this?
At Wimbledon, the announcer will declare love for both sides in front of God, the Queen, and everyone else. Is he some kind of hippy? No. That's just another way of saying zero. How did "zero" become "love"? The most common theory is that it came from the habit of calling a zero an egg (as in "goose egg", or "duck egg" in some places.) Okay, how does "egg" become "love"? By way of French "l'oeuf". Wikipedia tells me that this is not proven, and is challenged on the basis that the French themselves never used "l'oeuf" to mean zero so there's no way an English-speaker could have misheard them... but of course, that's supposing it was a mistake in the first place, and not an in-joke, or a series of them.
First someone calls zero "the big ol' goose egg", or its equivalent. Then somebody decides that's undignified and decides to class it up by putting it in "the language of the court" (because everything sounds classier in French). It sounds kind of like "love", so by and by people start just saying "love", and before you can say "no1curr"... ladies and gentlemen, a meme is born.
Did it happen that way? I don't know. No one does. But we do know this: on a fairly regular basis, a very serious man will say "love" in a very serious tone and mean "zero".
I've said it before and it bears repeating: these kinds of changes to the language didn't start with the internet, or with our generation, or the moment you (for any given value thereof) first noticed memes, in-jokes, slang, text/IM conventions, or whatever else creeping into the language. It's been going on forever, and the examples of how it's affected the language we speak just go on and on, too. It is the language we speak.
We today use words that were just metaphors to our ancestors, or are bastardized foreign words that they thought sound cool, or really just rhymed with the actual word they meant... or in some cases, are another part of a phrase containing a word that rhymes with the word they meant.
Why does "bread" mean "money"? Because "money" rhymes with "honey", of course. Now "bread" meaning "money" isn't exactly standard English, but it's well-known and has spread beyond its Cockney roots. And of course, it is part of standard English that salt means money. No, really... the "salary" you get paid comes from "salarium". Salt money, the stipend given to Roman soldiers to buy the the essential staple of life that is salt.
Of course, that happened two thousand years ago, so we call it "etymology" and act like it isn't really kind of weird. Which it isn't. It also isn't weird that we use a 16th century contraction of "God be with you" every time we say "goodbye".
This is just how language works.
The problem... if it is a problem... is that language never stopped working this way. When you try to view a language that's still widely spoken as a finished product, it's like viewing a snapshot of a horse mid-stride with one hoof on the ground and saying "Well, clearly a horse is an animal with one leg and three arms." Or looking at the corpse of a horse and saying, "Well, clearly, a horse is something very much like a corpse."
English isn't dead yet. It's a vital language... living, growing, and evolving. None of us can predict with any certainty which of the conventions that have been emerging through the late 20th and early 21st century will catch on to the point that they will eventually be codified and recognized as being a formal part of the language (though there have already been some cringe-inducing additions to the dictionaries in the past two decades), but we can predict with a certainty that some of them will.
& it will be OK.
Srsly.
&
See that?
You're looking at the future.
But you're not just looking at any future, you're looking at one of those chilling dystopian types where the laws of civilization have been thrown out the window and anarchy reigns. Why? Because when you look at the symbol "&", you are looking at a world where such abomination as "leetspeak", "chatspeak", and "lolcat" can become accepted as a standard part of formal English.
To understand the future, we have to go back into the past. By the end of the 18th century, English-speaking schoolchildren were reciting their alphabets with a few flourishes that would strike us as odd. For one thing, they included the ligature for "and"--that symbol above--at the end of the list. For another thing, they attached the Latin phrase "per se" (essentially, "in itself") to any item in the recitation that could stand as a word. This included such notable vowels as A and I, and of course it included the ligature.
So the early 19th century recitation of the alphabet didn't end "X, Y, and Z."
No, it went "X, Y, Z, and per se and."
Do you see where this is going? The name we give that funny squiggly mark has no proper basis, it's just a product of one too many rote recitations being slurred, misremembered, or misunderstood.
And-per se-and.
Ampersand.
And now it's part of our language. And that mark? I called it a ligature. That's something we don't really do in American English. It's two letters written as a single glyph. When you see someone using British English typing "foetus" or an archaic spelling like "aeon" (as in the cartoon that was never adapted into a movie, Aeon Flux), you're witnessing an odd linguistic twist where two separate letters are being used to approximate a ligature that itself replaced the separate letters. The actual spelling would be "fœtus" or "æon".
The history of ligatures' rising and falling fortunes follows the history of writing technology. In the earliest forms of writing, they just sort of happened because some symbols tended to run into each other. Scribes copying books out by hand developed them intentionally as shortcuts. They survived the earliest forms of mass printing, but the more things trended towards standardization and mass production, the more superfluous all these special characters seemed to be. What was once a great saver of time became a bit of a needless expense.
Ligatures can be kind of a big deal in some languages but nowadays even in British English ligatures are often used just for stylistic flourishes (again, as in the title of the aforementioned cartoons), but & remains.
Those of you who aren't familiar with this history and don't know enough about language to fill in the gaps are probably wondering exactly what two letters "&" is supposed to be. Even if I tell you, you'll have to turn your head and squint a little to see them... it's sort of gone through multiple generations of flourishes.
The letters, though, are E and t.
Et.
Latin for "and", naturally.
To make a long story short*, we have in current use in the English language a symbol that we read as "and", that we give a name that has all the dignity and etymological standing of "pasghetti", and that we represent as a scribbled version of the same word in a different language.
I submit to you that a hundred internets operating for a couple of months (this is a hundred years, in internet time) could not come up with a linguistic convention more ridiculous than the simple ampersand... and yet no one looks at it askance when it shows up in the names of old and venerable corporations like AT&T, on the letterheads of respectable law firms, in published legal documents or even the bodies of laws themselves.
The future is here, in other words... the future where chatspeak has become accepted. And it's not just the &.
Computer programs designed for the very professionaliest of professional applications will still tell its users to click "OK" to continue, even though "OK" is a newspaper in-joke from the days when media itself was new media. It's an abbreviation for "oll korrect" (all correct). What can the modern era haz that compares to this?
At Wimbledon, the announcer will declare love for both sides in front of God, the Queen, and everyone else. Is he some kind of hippy? No. That's just another way of saying zero. How did "zero" become "love"? The most common theory is that it came from the habit of calling a zero an egg (as in "goose egg", or "duck egg" in some places.) Okay, how does "egg" become "love"? By way of French "l'oeuf". Wikipedia tells me that this is not proven, and is challenged on the basis that the French themselves never used "l'oeuf" to mean zero so there's no way an English-speaker could have misheard them... but of course, that's supposing it was a mistake in the first place, and not an in-joke, or a series of them.
First someone calls zero "the big ol' goose egg", or its equivalent. Then somebody decides that's undignified and decides to class it up by putting it in "the language of the court" (because everything sounds classier in French). It sounds kind of like "love", so by and by people start just saying "love", and before you can say "no1curr"... ladies and gentlemen, a meme is born.
Did it happen that way? I don't know. No one does. But we do know this: on a fairly regular basis, a very serious man will say "love" in a very serious tone and mean "zero".
I've said it before and it bears repeating: these kinds of changes to the language didn't start with the internet, or with our generation, or the moment you (for any given value thereof) first noticed memes, in-jokes, slang, text/IM conventions, or whatever else creeping into the language. It's been going on forever, and the examples of how it's affected the language we speak just go on and on, too. It is the language we speak.
We today use words that were just metaphors to our ancestors, or are bastardized foreign words that they thought sound cool, or really just rhymed with the actual word they meant... or in some cases, are another part of a phrase containing a word that rhymes with the word they meant.
Why does "bread" mean "money"? Because "money" rhymes with "honey", of course. Now "bread" meaning "money" isn't exactly standard English, but it's well-known and has spread beyond its Cockney roots. And of course, it is part of standard English that salt means money. No, really... the "salary" you get paid comes from "salarium". Salt money, the stipend given to Roman soldiers to buy the the essential staple of life that is salt.
Of course, that happened two thousand years ago, so we call it "etymology" and act like it isn't really kind of weird. Which it isn't. It also isn't weird that we use a 16th century contraction of "God be with you" every time we say "goodbye".
This is just how language works.
The problem... if it is a problem... is that language never stopped working this way. When you try to view a language that's still widely spoken as a finished product, it's like viewing a snapshot of a horse mid-stride with one hoof on the ground and saying "Well, clearly a horse is an animal with one leg and three arms." Or looking at the corpse of a horse and saying, "Well, clearly, a horse is something very much like a corpse."
English isn't dead yet. It's a vital language... living, growing, and evolving. None of us can predict with any certainty which of the conventions that have been emerging through the late 20th and early 21st century will catch on to the point that they will eventually be codified and recognized as being a formal part of the language (though there have already been some cringe-inducing additions to the dictionaries in the past two decades), but we can predict with a certainty that some of them will.
& it will be OK.
Srsly.
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no subject
on 2011-02-25 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-25 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-25 11:43 pm (UTC)First, I solemnly swear that I have read the entirety of every single one of these posts.
on 2011-02-26 12:07 am (UTC)I just feel like there's a difference between the gradual evolution of language and general illiteracy. When there are people who spell "everybody" "everbuddy" and "should've" as "should of" because they don't know better, that's very different from the slow progress of et into & into ampersand into and. When I see people using "srsly" who then cannot spell "seriously" when prompted, I see that as a problem, not an evolution. Know the rules before you break them, so to speak.
I'm not defending super-pedants here, but I am going to have to say that I don't give a rat's ass about what you do on your own time, but in formal writing, unless you're making a point about language itself or quoting, use current formally accepted language. As it changes, change with it; but until it does, you're striking the wrong tone for your audience if you write a term paper full of lulz or a novel of rlys and 0mg.
no subject
on 2011-02-26 12:35 am (UTC)And you know it when you see it, right?
When there are people who spell "everybody" "everbuddy" and "should've" as "should of" because they don't know better, that's very different from the slow progress of et into & into ampersand into and.
In the way that the beginning of a sentence is very different from a sentence, perhaps.
When I see people using "srsly" who then cannot spell "seriously" when prompted, I see that as a problem, not an evolution.
You can sell me on not being able to spell "seriously" as a problem without much effort, but you're introducing a red herring by even mentioning "srsly".
As it changes, change with it; but until it does, you're striking the wrong tone for your audience
No.
You're striking the wrong tone for some audiences.
And some audiences really ought to go hang themselves, to use a slightly outdated vernacular. One of the important things that happens when standards are relaxed/liberalized is an increase in literacy.
Yes, an increase. A world where everybody spells "everybody" the same way is axiomatically going to be a less literate world than one where things are a bit more open to interpretation. How do I figure? Because the lower the standards are (without reaching the point-of-no-return where nobody can understand anybody), the more people there will be who can reach them. You see this throughout history. The harder and more exacting a task writing and reading is, the smaller the class of people who can read and write has been.
I have friends who couldn't spell "seriously" consistently if their lives depended on it. They aren't stupid. It's not that they don't care. Their brains just are better suited for other things that sorting out or remembering the pretty arbitrary arrangement of vowels that go into a word like "seriously". Could they take letters and arrange them in such a way that we'd read it and pronounce it "seriously"? Yes, they could do that. So these are people who are only illiterate because of where we've placed the dividing line... much as the federal government can rescue people from poverty by moving a line, you can render them literate or illiterate simply by deciding where the cut-off is.
Now, if you really have been reading every damn line of every one of these posts then you know I'm not calling for a total liberalization of all standards, but really, we could do worse then a word where no1currs how a word is spelled as long as the letters add up to the right sound. We could do much worse.
Maybe you can't imagine a world without standardized spellings, but it existed. Shakespeare lived in it. He wrote his plays pre-standardization. Would he have written as much or as well if he had to be concerned not just with the right words but the right letters? Imagine if his work languished in obscurity, unproduced and unpublished, because some... editor... somewhere decided that a man who can't be bothered to spell his own name the same way twice shouldn't be allowed to write plays.
If I have a single point, it's not that language tomorrow will be different from language today. It's that language today isn't like language today. Anybody who thinks they know formal English is looking at the corpse of an impostor while the real English sneaks out the back window.
Yes, "every damn line"! Seriously! Promise!
on 2011-02-26 01:43 am (UTC)I do agree that meaning is the purpose of language. If you are able to effectively communicate with another human being, than you have officially Won Language in the strictest sense. In my personal, not-particularly-qualified opinion, however, what you sacrifice when you adopt 1337 or lolspeak or whatever is worth more than what you gain.
Words are stories about themselves; etymology is beautiful, complicated, and forever evolving. It's not the change in words that I have a problem with, not at all. It's when we abandon that beautiful string that came before for a new form that doesn't care for that history. It just feels like a culture abandoning its stories, in a way, and that's considered a loss whenever it happens.
Et-&-and per se and-ampersand-and is a chain of evolution; no1currs is, to me, laziness that disregards that same kind of beautiful history in a way that we haven't done before. Maybe you're right, and in the future we'll be using alphanumeric words left and right, and we'll be able to trace the evolution even there. For now, though, I'm just not so sure.
(Also, I am aware of non-standardized spelling; one of my favorite novels is from 1749, and if the main character's name were more than three letters long you could bet the author'd spell it 27 different ways per chapter; instead he just focuses on permutations of "sagacious" most of the time.)
One thing where I think we'll never see eye-to-eye is on standards versus accessibility. The way it seems to me, (and please, please correct me if I'm misinterpreting, I'm not trying to misconstrue anything you've said,) is that having standards that are too exacting reduces accessibility. I can agree with that, but I'm also not sure I agree that simplifying language is the answer.
Say that 50 kids in physics fail the final exam, but 50 kids are normally distributed across the standard A-D range. Do you drop Einstein from physics, or do you find a better teacher, or look into the lives of kids that failed and see if you can't put them into a situation where they can pass? What I'm saying is that, despite our historically high literacy rates, if you think there's a problem, don't look at language to find it. It's in the way we teach it and the system we live in. Changing language addresses a symptom and leaves the disease running wild. Kids can't spell, so make spelling easier? No, find out why kids can't spell and fix the problems that make that so.
I think that's enough for now. I hope I'm not upsetting you, because that's really not my intent. I just disagree, and I'm curious to see your thoughts.
no subject
on 2011-02-26 02:00 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-26 02:03 am (UTC)I guess conversation time is over?
no subject
on 2011-02-26 02:11 am (UTC)But you want a discussion?
Okay, here's your discussion.
"Ampersand" is exactly the same kind of laziness as "no1curr".
Except you know what? In fact, it's more so. "No1curr" is artifice, which means there is the possibility of cleverness. Someone did that on purpose to make a point. The contrivance of its laziness adds a layer of meaning, of depth to how much the speaker doesn't care. It says something.
"Ampersand" is just... it just happened. Because kids were lazy and teachers didn't bother to correct them, because the rote exercise of recitation was valued over the teaching of content and meaning. Because students just said it, over and over again, without knowing what it was they were saying.
"Ampersand" is institutional laziness writ large. "No1curr" is someone being clever with a coinage. On the same level as Shakespeare? Dunno. Shakespeare's improvisations weren't exactly universally hailed as clever in his day, were they?
You don't accept "ampersand" because it happened organically and slowly. You accept it because it happened before you got here. Not only has the damage been done, but you don't even see it as damage. If it were happening now, you'd be wringing your hands in distaste. I guarantee this, because you can't muster a complaint about any of the modern neologisms or emergent conventions that wouldn't have applied just the same to it at the time.
Seriously. Go ahead. Tell me something you don't like about "everbuddy" or "could of" or "no1curr" that doesn't apply to ampersand. You haven't so far.
no subject
on 2011-02-26 02:33 am (UTC)I really, actually do like the organic quality of "ampersand." Yeah, it's lazy as hell! But you're right; in my interpretation, its age does give it a boost over no1curr. What I'm saying is: the process matters. When no1curr is standard because [completely inexact number of] people have been lazy in the same way, you're right, I won't have the same problem with it. Hundreds of thousands of school children screwing up the same way over time says something about people, and the way we think, the WAY we get lazy. No1curr doesn't have that yet, and at this point we can't tell if it ever will; I'm convinced there are TONS of other evolutions that people tried to start over the years that totally failed, and no1curr might be one or not.
Summary: in 50, 20, 10, 5 years, if people are saying no1curr in their speeches and papers, awesome! I won't argue, I swear to whatever deity you personally prefer. Conventions change; work within the one you've got at the time, because it's going to be different from one day to the next. For now, keep it 2 ur txts n teh internets wher itz totes legit 4 l4nguag3 2b mor flooid n impr3cis3. That don't bother me none, I just think we should have the versatility to adapt our tone to the audience we address.
I'm not sure why you're REALLY ready to hate me, but honestly, I don't think we're THAT far off from what we both think.
no subject
on 2011-02-26 03:05 am (UTC)But here's the thing. You came onto this post and you said, in effect, "Yeah, I agree with you! Good point! Except... there are people out there saying 'could of' and I feel the need to inform you that this is WRONG, WRONG, WRONGITY-WRONG-WRONG."
And I wasn't really talking about dropping standards at all. I never put myself forward as a champion of "could of" or "everbuddy". I don't put them in the same category as the changes that I actually advocate for, so your bringing them up is kind of a non-sequitur.
It would be very puzzling, but it actually kind of fits into a context.
That context? Well, as I said: "Elitism: you haz it." You can accept that I'm here making arguments for why -some things- that are often labeled as wrong maybe are kind of okay, but you just have to throw out there... to reassure yourself, or get reassurance from me, or whatever... that some things are still wrong, some people are still wrong.
And you know, I don't think you actually do respect the process of language. I don't think you're capable of it... I'm watching you recoil from the process. I don't mean that as an insult. Not everybody can stand to watch sausage being made. My problem with you is that you're turning up your nose at the people who can stomach the work of making sausage while enjoying the tasty sausages that have already been made. And I know and you know that if you had been there when the sausage you're eating was being made, you'd be turning your nose up at it, too.
It's a form of snobbery, but if that's all that were going on here I wouldn't be quite so quick to call you out. It's the elitism. It's the idea that if everybody's brain doesn't work the same way, it's wrong, it's a disease (disgusting word choice on multiple levels).
You know what? No. Just... no. If we want a society where everybody reads, we need to make writing accessible. If we choose not to do so, we choose not to do so.
This isn't a matter of opinion, it's a matter of axiom: you include or you exclude. The history of the written word bears this out.
In the pre-phonetic days, it took a lifetime's study to really be able to read and write, which meant that priests who dedicated their lives to such things could read and write well, and wealthy and powerful people who had more leisure time could read and write a little, and so on down the social ladder. As pictograms gave way to phonetic symbols representing consonants, you could learn to form words with fewer symbols... the "knowledge" component became knowing how to read the vowels, when there were words that had the same consonant sounds in the same order but different vowels. When vowels were added to the alphabet, suddenly anybody who learned a handful of symbols could encode or decode any word that they heard.
The word "revolution" doesn't begin to sum up what that meant.
Now obviously there are a multitude of shades of gray in between the land of king-priests and heiroglyphics and a world where everybody scribbles what they feel like and expects anyone who looks at it to suss out their meaning. There is room to have a discussion about where the optimal point in between those two extremes is, but... and this is a big but... I'm not interested in having that conversation with someone who regards it as a "disease" when someone's brain is not wired up for letters the same way hers is, who thinks that we need to fix people to encourage literacy.
Did you in the course of reading every line of my writing on this subject miss the part where I referred to my friends who can't sort out the arbitrary vowels in "seriously"? I should introduce you to them! You can solve their lives and fix the fact that their brains aren't like your brain!
I am honestly impressed with how restrained my initial reply to that was. You felt it was dismissive, but if I wanted to dismiss you, I could have done so far more colorfully than that, and you would have earned each and every single word.
no subject
on 2011-02-26 02:27 am (UTC)"Could of" and "ampersand".
Okay, both happened as a result of people lazily writing down what a shortened version of a phrase sounds like.
But "could of" is based on a contraction, a formally recognized and standard shortening in the English language, where "ampersand" is based on slurring a phrase together through laziness.
"Could of" is decoded phonetically exactly the same as the proper spelling of the contraction "could've", which in itself replicates the sounds in "could have" that it doesn't omit.
"Ampersand", on the other hand, changes a consonant completely, for no particular reason. It "could of" been "anpersand" just as easily. The fact that it isn't only highlights the haphazard nature of its creation: the people who were saying it didn't know what they were saying and didn't care.
So which one is lazier? Which one shows less care and attention to the language? If we're going to be comparing them on their merits, it's obvious that "could of" is the clear winner. The only measurement by which "ampersand" wins is arguably longevity, and I'm not sure "could of" wasn't around in the 1800s.
"Ampersand" has slipped into formal use while "could of" hasn't because it doesn't look as much like a mistake, especially once we get past the point where most people are going to be familiar with the and-per se-and business. But again, that's more laziness, more ignorance and apathy... "ampersand" gained Real Word status because people didn't know and didn't care where it came from.
Is this enough conversation? Too much? I don't want to leave you with the wrong amount of discussion here.
no subject
on 2011-02-26 02:35 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-26 02:53 am (UTC)A similar n>m shift happened when in+perfectus spawned imperfect.
no subject
on 2011-02-26 03:12 am (UTC)Also, I'd wager that most of those pesky "imps" have the same gloss of antiquity compared to "ampersand" that "ampersand" has compared to more modern mutations.
Elitism
on 2011-02-28 01:49 pm (UTC)But seriously, elitism is a valid philosophy.
Re: Elitism
on 2011-02-28 04:08 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-26 07:51 pm (UTC)A book that is arguably one of the most technologically influential of the last 50 years completely shunned modern language convention. In 1984 William Gibson wrote a book called Neuromancer that coined the term "cyberspace", and showed us what the future of virtual reality and the internet would look like. We would not be on here discussing this were it not for him. This book of his is written in English but it's incomprehensible; you don't understand a word of it, and some of the words are just made up slang of the future. Reading this book is like immersing yourself into a culture with a completely different language, and only after you've read halfway through do you really begin to understand what you're reading. But the book is so amazing that when you're finished you go back and read it again right from the beginning so you can understand what happened before. Yeah, it bugs me when people write "your" instead of "you're", but without letting language evolve nothing else will either.
Also, what was the * for?
no subject
on 2011-02-26 09:01 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-26 02:30 am (UTC)I also have no time for people who "can't be bothered" when it comes to being clear in their communication, but want me to put the effort in to understanding them.
no subject
on 2011-02-26 02:53 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-26 03:06 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-26 03:08 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-26 03:08 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-26 03:09 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-26 03:18 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-26 04:11 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-26 04:15 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-26 07:16 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-26 03:13 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-26 06:53 pm (UTC)