All those silly Internet slangs
The English Language is morphing.
You could hardly hear people speaking portentous Victorian English nowadays, save for some pedantic conservative and aged people. There are no more Henry James, no more Charles Dickens, and no more Shakespeare. Some of us would label those writers as bombastic, pompous and redoubtable. Some of us, in extreme cases, would perceive them as repugnant and arcane, and that they have no productive use in the real world today where technology dominates. We would rather ditch their convoluted language into the trash bin than to commit many days and years to study them, as if we are breaking a significant code.
Moreover, there are bound to be students maundering about the difficulty they have in grokking literary writing; even essays and opinions that you can find in any newspaper and magazine. You can give them novels and articles, but they will hardly read a page and will give you a lackluster look; unless they can relate their experiences to the stories or rarely, they have a strong English vocabulary. Parents usually see their children reading romance novels and comics rather than serious literature. This kind of attitude explains why teachers generally mark essays written by students that are mediocre and bland, some of which are saturated with spelling and grammatical errors. What's more, there is a rampant disease - a disease of the English Language.
Don't worry, it is not a disease that will cost your life. It is a disease of communication that will impede understanding.
Slangs like tyvm, l.o.l, wtf, pos, ttyl abound. They can be found in text messages, e-mails, informal writing and even essays that will be marked by teachers. I don't know whether these so-called cool slangs really does embolden people or not, but these people are undoubtedly addicted to using Internet slangs, and their vocabulary is limited to those slangs. It gets irritating when I read those flippant messages sent by my friends in my mobile phone and e-mail. With that kind of shallow knowledge, I do not know how they would be able to communicate and negotiate effectively in the workforce. They would probably scratch their heads when they read legal papers and academic writings. That might explain why people seldom read texts in privacy policies and indemnities.
True, you can still communicate and get along with your friends. But would we want our good old English Language to be amalgamated with impurities, and to be drastically altered into something new? Would we want to lose a heritage so great and disregard formal English writers and put them into desuetude? What's the anathema to using proper English for?
Humans are creative - even the harshest critic admit it. They can invent abbreviations to shorten the way phrases are spelled and spoken to make life simpler. However, imagine that if every phrase, idiom and whatnot was to be abbreviated, would there be any explicit way to understand what we are writing? What if the trademark name HubPages became HP? Would we be befuddled by namesakes like Hewlett Packard (HP), an American multinational information technology corporation? How would you know that a person is referring to HubPages or Hewlett Packard?
I call Internet slangs fatuous not because I detest them. I just want to deter people from learning more of these slangs. They are simply substitutes for established words. I am afraid that our English heritage will be lost and superseded by Internet language.
And what do you think: will the pure English Language or the Internet Language triumph?
