Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [53]
The aim is always to make networking easier and faster, for business or pleasure. The latest twist is for teachers to use social networks for posting homework assignments and conducting quizzes. Parents are also in the mix. It’s a sign of the times that some have to use the World Wide Web to reach their youngsters in the next room at home.
Messaging has become a drug. The more you do, the more you want. It’s also an invitation to be creative. Innovation is almost forced by the word limits and time factors. For instant messaging, the limit for a single transmission is only 160 characters. On Twitter, whether you network or micro log, your tweets must not be any longer than 140 characters.
In only five years of existence, Twitter has gained about 200 million users who generate some 150 million tweets and retweets per day. The Twitter Blog says that by March 2011, new “accounts” were being added at the rate of about 500,000 a day. We may be approaching a case of Twitterrhea because of the heavy twaffic.
CAN FACEBOOK BE UNHEALTHY?
Spending a lot of time on Facebook can lead to syphilis, according to Peter Kelly, director of public health in the Sunderland, Durham, and Teesside areas of Britain. He found a fourfold increase in the disease in areas where Facebook was most popular.3
Facebook has also been linked to terrorism and bullying. According to Britain’s Department of Homeland Security, terrorists use the site to find new recruits and teach bomb making.
The strict limit tends to increase the attraction of the popular website and guarantees rapid and numerous postings by many people on the move. That makes it especially useful to journalists, who tend to tweet by smart phone, especially when reporting a large, complex event with other journalists. Others who seek public attention, such as bloggers, use the site to “build traffic.”
The net result is that Twitter, like other social networks, plays a large—though completely casual—role in spreading Amglish, the type of English that results from such hasty, limited-length verbalizations.
DEFYING THE RULES
In the new atmosphere, there is general public reluctance to abide by traditional rules of grammar and syntax. Relaxed is the way to go, whether it is making up words or ignoring crusty standards for writing and speaking.
The making of language was once likened to the spreading of knowledge by Samuel Johnson, the famed creator of the first comprehensive dictionary of English in 1755. “Knowledge,” he said, “always desires increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but which will afterwards propagate itself.” He continued, “When [people] once desire to learn, they will naturally have recourse to the nearest language by which that desire can be gratified.”4
By saying that people tend to take the “nearest language,” he seemed to be saying that people tend to use the easiest way to write or speak, whether it is their national language or someone else’s, and that like fire, language is constantly being consumed and altered as long as there is sufficient fuel.
Others compare the making of language and its rules of the road to Darwin’s survival of the fittest. They see it as a natural evolvement of human sounds in the form of words and letters that are organized by actual practice for communicating with others. Changes in words and rules come the same way. So what is written down or prescribed as a word or rule in one era may be ignored in the next.
VERBAL CREATIONISM
The period of greatest linguistic change in all history has been the past two decades, coinciding with the blossoming of the Internet throughout the world. The computer has democratized human communication and helped to free language from the rusty concept of being