Our language

First of all, thanks Tim from Italy for talking to me. Talking to Tim is always smooth. I feel like I can say anything. I don't know. Tim is older than I am, so I guess it is the wisdom comes with experiences and age? I am not sure. But every time we always have a good conversation. I just wish that we could talk longer. One of us always has to go at some point ha ha.

This morning we casually talked, and a very interesting topic was brought up.

The conversation started with I describing how people communicate differently based on their age. I just met someone in school. He is a straight-acting gay and he is much younger than I am. He is a Freshman at USC, which means he is 18 years old. I am 23 and he is 18. In my mind, I still think 18, 20, 23 whatever, no biggie. But when I REALLY think about it. OMG, I am 5 years older than he is and that is 50% of 10 years and 25% of 20 years. That is very scary. He is much more energetic. His energy is very original. You know the difference between the "I wake up high, great day dude, damn I am awesome" and the "Today is Thursday, just 1 more day I can go to a bar finally, I hope people don't fuck it up somewhere so I have to work extra hours, I wonder how many floating vacation days I have left...but Friday is almost here yeay!"... I tested him, and he would text me super long texts with endings of "woooopppyyy" with all that extra Os, Ps, and Ys. I don't know, I really feel old. So I complained about this to Tim. He said that well, that is interesting because how our language evolved.

Tim believes that language is a medium of communication and as our society becomes more fast-paced each day, our language is forced to adapt. A lot of conventional use of words and sentences will become a dominant trend and eventually become our language norm.

I personally do not agree. I think language is more than mere communication. Each language is unique and each language possesses its own literature and history. I believe that current technology is a deterioration to our language and literature. We all use it. For example, thx, 2night, str8, <3,>. For those of you who have Detail magazine, you probably have read the artcile regarding this issue. The vast use of blackberry literature is poisoning people's senses. Little by little I really think people will not be able to tell which one is formal writing anymore.

Tim brought up an argument saying that Shakespeare's language was their blackberry literature and it was widely celebrated. However, it is still hard to read for people today because language progresses based on human's needs for efficiency. What works faster prevails. I agree to a certain degree. The biggest problem of his argument is that Shakespeare's language was English and we still use English, though differently, by its literature rules. Words such as thx 2morow violate the English rule. Unless we change the fundamental rules of certain language, usage of these words or similar sentences should never be used in formal writings and it should never become our norm. Shakespeare did not misspell English for the common folks to hear his plays. His style was informal, not his language or literature.

I don't know. I think it is kind of interesting so I posted this open for discussion! haha.