I'd Like To Buy A Vowel
A word is a powerful thing: a collection of letters that when added together in combination can describe anything imaginable. When words come together, meaning is invoked, stories are told and lessons are learned. However, a word only becomes meaningful with a mind present to interpret its symbolism. Rhetoric, stimulates the mind to sense meaning deeper than what is actually on the page. The style of writing brings forth imagery and emotion in the reader, with the letters on the page simply serving as the vector between the writer's thoughts and reader's imagination.
The ability of the mind to wander into the beauty of text is limited only by the energy that must be devoted to decoding the letters themselves. The rest is easy. Authors may use eloquent vocabulary, prose vibrant as the brightest colours, symbolism thick as molasses, or carefully crafted communication to stimulate the mind of the reader. Words need not be long, as short words work just as well. It jst nds 2 mk sns, 2 b undrstd.
Witness the power of the mind. Certainly, based on prior experience, context and pattern recognition the human brain can infer meaning from even words that are incomplete. In a world where paint peels off of signs, coffee spills on magazines, and printers improvise document margins, this ability is an incredible evolutionary leap. However, hand in hand with this realization of supreme decoding ability has come a staggering decline in the ability to encode language; to write, with both meaning and style.
The internet and mobile devices have created an infrastructure that puts communication at our fingertips; the world of instant messaging. The incredible ease of data transmission, coupled with small screens and limitations on data length, has fractured conversations into a culture of soundbytes, with both sentences and words truncated to their smallest possible forms. Look around, the signs are everywhere: Diddy and J-Lo on the cover of magazines, shipping with Fedex, paying with Amex. In the pursuit of greater instancy, the message suffers. Because the mind must focus on decoding the words themselves, it decreases the ability to read between the lines and find the true meaning. To see this, one must simply look at the two greatest poets in literary history. Dylan (Zimmerman, not Thomas), would not relate, as L8 is not a simple twist of fate. If Shakespeare could text us now, he would surely tell us that "2 b is not To Be". The removal of vowels leaves words unable to sing, scream or shout. As the mind struggles to piece together appropriate sounds, metaphors and similes go unfound, like buried treasure with an incomplete map.
The use of shorthand and abbreviations is nothing new, as the lecture notes of any undergraduate student will demonstrate. Nor are they limited to the realm of the young, text messaging masses, as any medical journal will demonstrate. However, in each case, they serve a higher purpose: simplifying extraneous information so that the message is not lost for the sake of details. Certainly, the risk of losing literary style in a mundane text message to a friend is not anything to lose sleep over. Its true: the screens are small, and although thumbs are opposable, they are simply not built for typing. The invention of punctuation-based faces and emotional cues have similar merit when space limits the ability to fully express sarcasm and humor.
However, outside of this limited scope of utilitarian communication, a real world exists. A world of pens, paper and pixels without 150 character limits: a world where anyone can state a message, but everyone searches for meaning. Recently, worlds have collided and writing has suffered. For the keen investors out there, put your money into shares of Wheel of Fortune, for if the world revolves around a balance of supply and demand, current market research shows the cost of vowels is soaring. Whether through habit, laziness or a false sense of creativity, student work seems more at home in the world of Nokia rather than that of academia. With the multitude of words in existence, each and every person can surely devise something more creative than a phonetic remix of proper grammar. If humour is indeed humourous, one needn't instruct the audience to laugh out loud. And with all the typing, texting and telecommunicating, surely the musculature and dexterity of the human hand is capable of the endurance that is necessary to construct every letter in a word, every word in a sentence.
Languages are in a constant state of flux, with slang, jargon and new styles continually penetrating the collective lexicon considered as proper. As our interaction with computer and electronic devices increases, perhaps the current trend towards explicit emotional direction will be necessary. Even the most creative work will require a tag or emotional cue to trigger the proper response from the digital audience; the best joke ever told will go over like a lead balloon without the requisite (lol) to indicate humour, the sarcastic comment requiring a wink to prevent misunderstanding and subsequent meltdown. Until then, take into account the humanity of the audience, embracing the rhetorical devices that have stood the test of time. The following statement may also serve as a guideline when communicating with other human beings, a philosophical concept that no computer could ever understand:
If a collection of fractured words sit on a page, and no one is able to read them, do they make a sound?
The simple answer? No ;).
The ability of the mind to wander into the beauty of text is limited only by the energy that must be devoted to decoding the letters themselves. The rest is easy. Authors may use eloquent vocabulary, prose vibrant as the brightest colours, symbolism thick as molasses, or carefully crafted communication to stimulate the mind of the reader. Words need not be long, as short words work just as well. It jst nds 2 mk sns, 2 b undrstd.
Witness the power of the mind. Certainly, based on prior experience, context and pattern recognition the human brain can infer meaning from even words that are incomplete. In a world where paint peels off of signs, coffee spills on magazines, and printers improvise document margins, this ability is an incredible evolutionary leap. However, hand in hand with this realization of supreme decoding ability has come a staggering decline in the ability to encode language; to write, with both meaning and style.
The internet and mobile devices have created an infrastructure that puts communication at our fingertips; the world of instant messaging. The incredible ease of data transmission, coupled with small screens and limitations on data length, has fractured conversations into a culture of soundbytes, with both sentences and words truncated to their smallest possible forms. Look around, the signs are everywhere: Diddy and J-Lo on the cover of magazines, shipping with Fedex, paying with Amex. In the pursuit of greater instancy, the message suffers. Because the mind must focus on decoding the words themselves, it decreases the ability to read between the lines and find the true meaning. To see this, one must simply look at the two greatest poets in literary history. Dylan (Zimmerman, not Thomas), would not relate, as L8 is not a simple twist of fate. If Shakespeare could text us now, he would surely tell us that "2 b is not To Be". The removal of vowels leaves words unable to sing, scream or shout. As the mind struggles to piece together appropriate sounds, metaphors and similes go unfound, like buried treasure with an incomplete map.
The use of shorthand and abbreviations is nothing new, as the lecture notes of any undergraduate student will demonstrate. Nor are they limited to the realm of the young, text messaging masses, as any medical journal will demonstrate. However, in each case, they serve a higher purpose: simplifying extraneous information so that the message is not lost for the sake of details. Certainly, the risk of losing literary style in a mundane text message to a friend is not anything to lose sleep over. Its true: the screens are small, and although thumbs are opposable, they are simply not built for typing. The invention of punctuation-based faces and emotional cues have similar merit when space limits the ability to fully express sarcasm and humor.
However, outside of this limited scope of utilitarian communication, a real world exists. A world of pens, paper and pixels without 150 character limits: a world where anyone can state a message, but everyone searches for meaning. Recently, worlds have collided and writing has suffered. For the keen investors out there, put your money into shares of Wheel of Fortune, for if the world revolves around a balance of supply and demand, current market research shows the cost of vowels is soaring. Whether through habit, laziness or a false sense of creativity, student work seems more at home in the world of Nokia rather than that of academia. With the multitude of words in existence, each and every person can surely devise something more creative than a phonetic remix of proper grammar. If humour is indeed humourous, one needn't instruct the audience to laugh out loud. And with all the typing, texting and telecommunicating, surely the musculature and dexterity of the human hand is capable of the endurance that is necessary to construct every letter in a word, every word in a sentence.
Languages are in a constant state of flux, with slang, jargon and new styles continually penetrating the collective lexicon considered as proper. As our interaction with computer and electronic devices increases, perhaps the current trend towards explicit emotional direction will be necessary. Even the most creative work will require a tag or emotional cue to trigger the proper response from the digital audience; the best joke ever told will go over like a lead balloon without the requisite (lol) to indicate humour, the sarcastic comment requiring a wink to prevent misunderstanding and subsequent meltdown. Until then, take into account the humanity of the audience, embracing the rhetorical devices that have stood the test of time. The following statement may also serve as a guideline when communicating with other human beings, a philosophical concept that no computer could ever understand:
If a collection of fractured words sit on a page, and no one is able to read them, do they make a sound?
The simple answer? No ;).
posted by sobe at
5:04 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home