THE ASSASSINATION OF THE KING’S ENGLISH AT THE INTERNET

I am an immigrant to the United States, which means I learned my English in a foreign country. Fortunately, I matriculated at a school, or several schools to be exact, that emphasized being able to write and speak good English, so I was not handicapped in that respect coming to the United States.

I came to the United States as a young adult. I was gratified to find out that my spoken or verbal English was slightly accented, lightly sprinkled with archaic words but articulate enough for use in both the business and social world. Even now I still speak with a slight accent which others, especially ladies I am delighted to mention, rather like.

But I was really heartened to find out that my written English was even above average. Early in my corporate career in the United States, I found myself being asked to write documentation, reports and even manuals over native born Americans simply because my English was a wee bit more grammatically correct, concise and precise.

So with just some slight adjustments, including getting hep on slang and colloquialisms and other nuances of American English, I was not hard pressed to utilize my re-tooled brand of English here in the United States.

Now I find myself having to make slight adjustments again, upon joining up with myspace.com and other internet cyberstations . While visuals, graphics, and pictures make up the bulk of websites, straining its bandwidth, one still has to communicate with the written word. It is a hoot reading some of the comments and remarks in myspace.com and other websites.

Instead of being concise and precise, the idea nowadays seems to be more of abbreviating and coming up imprecise but creative words or phrases to convey a paragraph full of innuendoes. Misspellings are either tolerated or are now accepted for what I will call cybercation or cyberspace communication.

Abbreviations are probably the legacy of texting, and they are now part of both texting and cyberspace communication. “u r” of course is much faster to write than “you are” and even the uninitiated can figure out what “u r”
stands for.

Misspellings now run rampant, and they are the result of both economy of keyboard strokes and just sheer wanton lexicon disregard. The most egregious examples are “you’re” and “your” with the latter word winning about 99% of the time, as in “your hot.” Other examples include “their” and “there,” “were” and “where,” “bare” and “bear” and many other synonymous words.

I love the creative contractions, like “waddup” which I believe is a progression from “what’s up?” to “wassup” to “waddup.” Is “waddup” the past tense of “wassup?”

The word “very” has been banished from some people’s vocabulary and has now been replaced by the word “fuckin” or “friggin” to give it a more superlative kick, as in “fuckin hot” to convey the idea that the lady in question is not just “very hot” but “fuckin hot.” Even the sexually uninitiated should be able to get that picture.

The saving grace of all this is, as I have pointed out in previous blogs, is that myspace.com is a microcosm of the human universe. The young and the restless and the cool are entitled to their colorful, unique and contemporary version of written English.

For now, I am happy to report that the addled purists like myself, decrying the death of the King’s English in the internet, are still permitted their concise and precise, albeit old-fashioned and archaic brand of English to exist side by side with the new cybercation (internet or cyber communication, remember?) See how many strokes I saved? I will get the hang of this yet.