Fingered Speech

“It’s a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words.” -1984, George Orwell

Texting- will it destroy our ability to write and the very foundations of our language? Will the next generations grow longer thumbs and shorter vocabularies?!  ha!

Probably not. In fact, blogging shares a lot in common with texting! To quote from an interesting TED talk with linguist John McWhorter, texting is just another dialect of language. It is fingered-speech, writing like speaking!

I’m one of those who forgets this, constantly going back and trying to error-correct, capitalize and punctuate – a real grammar nerd. 

But at root, texting is just casual speech, loosely held together and free-flowing, as natural as any other language. 

So, we are fine, as long as we realize that there other kinds of writing that are important as well, such as literary novels, sonnets and poems, editorials and journals, – all dialects of our complex ways of expressing language. 

It is still really important to use our voices, though, if we really want to speak to one another. “Speak to Me” – Amy Lee

In a couple of days, we will also look at music as language! 🙂

 

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