The Original Gay Porn Community - Free Gay Movies and Photos, Gay Porn Site Reviews and Adult Gay Forums

  • Welcome To Just Us Boys - The World's Largest Gay Message Board Community

    In order to comply with recent US Supreme Court rulings regarding adult content, we will be making changes in the future to require that you log into your account to view adult content on the site.
    If you do not have an account, please register.
    REGISTER HERE - 100% FREE / We Will Never Sell Your Info

    To register, turn off your VPN; you can re-enable the VPN after registration. You must maintain an active email address on your account: disposable email addresses cannot be used to register.

  • Hi Guest - Did you know?
    Hot Topics is a Safe for Work (SFW) forum.

Chats and Instant Messangers are destroying our language.

Zeremonie said:
We do our youth a disservice by not teaching them a wide vocabulary and excellent tools for communication.

I think you are right in an important regard:

just a nonsensical rant as i write this post after a drink or two.
Click to expand...

Well, bottoms up, dearie <hic>

I should also add that I think American schools get an undeserved bad rap these days. Do you know how hard it is to get into, say an Ivy league college today? You need to have a GPA well above 4.0 (which means you have to take a lot of advanced placement classes). And you have to have truly stunning extracurriculars, like building yurts in Mongolia on your summer vacation.

Also, I just read an article that says IQ scores have actually been going up, by about 3 points per decade. So today's high school kids are actually smarter than those of use who are -- older. They have to work so hard in school, who cares if they like to goof around with silly abbreviations in their spare time?
 
ds_writr said:
You all think chats and IMs are the root cause though?

I mean, morse code and all sorts of abbreviated clicking or smoke signals have been used in the past and none of it meant an end to language or culture as we know it.

Instead, I tend to think that the lame level of language skills is sometimes a by-product of not having much to say.

If you have a great deal to communicate, even your short-hand and ciphers will become somewhat complex or elaborate after a while (until finally, you have a very complex language once again).

But if one doesn't have much to offer or doesn't know much, then one can reply
"mhawww" or "awesome" or "mo'cookies'mommy"
to just about everything.

And then there is the use of smileys in writing online. They're at home in so much chat and online posting.

But there can be a loss in the writing skill of inflection due to reliance on pictographs.

You can write "I hate you" but add a wink (online) far more easily than you could write or communicate the same sentiment sans visual clues (as is more the rule in writing off-line).

I receive personal hand-written correspondence everyday in which people will include a "LOL" at the end of a sentence. Or adults draw smileys at the beginning or end of a hand-written sentence (sent snail mail) causing some letters have the look of something written by pre-schoolers.

What's acceptable "online" doesn't always translate well to offline correspondence and other writing.

But perhaps we have a culture more and more regularly doing less and less writing (and living) offline?
Click to expand...

Omg that's awesome. LOL

MWWWWWWWWAH ..|


sorry
​
 
Yes, languages are fluent. And yes, languages change. But they are not that fluent that they change every few decades, at least not by this much. Most big changes in language start are first used by a minority. It gains in popularity and becomes the standard. As of yet, chatspeak is used by a small part of the population. Unfortunately, that part easily influenced and will use a type of language that is only suitable in highly informal situations in class and in formal letters. I too have seen it while correcting students' written work - and I teach English as a second language.

The fact that kids use it doesn't make it the accepted form of English in formal situations. It does, however, indicate that there might be a large change over the next 50 or so years. Until that time, I will keep on correcting students who write LOL or end their formal letters with 'greetz'
 
Words and language are a source of power.

I've noticed that some younger people use the IM way of spelling not only as an easier way to "type" out messages on a handheld but also as rebellion, an assertion of youthful power, carrying it over to email and Internet forums.

Younger members of society try to assert their power, struggling to come out from under the power of the older members of society by bucking tradition. That's the way it's always been, and should be. And older members of society are generally annoyed with it. Using IM spelling as a way to do that seems kind of lame, as the way kids have usually tried to assert their power seemed lame.

Reminds me of the song "Kids" from the 1960 Bye Bye Birdie:

Kids!
I don't know what's wrong with these kids today!
Kids!
Who can understand anything they say?
Kids!
They're disobedient, disrespectful oafs!
Noisy, crazy, dirty, lazy, loafers!
While we're on the subject:
Kids!
You can talk and talk till your face is blue!
Kids!
But they still do just what they want to do!
Why can't they be like we were,
Perfect in every way?
What's the matter with kids today?​
 
Non-standard writing and spelling is the same as non-standard speaking. It's fine, but if it's all you know, it'll keep you from getting a really good job.
 
My two cents: I do my best to make my flawed version of the English language tolerable, but you capitalize your letters on MSN, you haven't lived.
 
Paws said:
Nobody pointed this out?
Click to expand...

I was itching to, but I thought I'd wait and see if somebody else caught it.

In the newsgroup alt.usage.english, that's known as Skitt's law: If you post a thread complaining about other people's grammar or spelling mistakes, you're sure to make one yoursefl.
 
The history of English is full of people complaining vigorously whenever there's a new trend, or usage. No doubt in time English usage will encompass some forms of SMS communication, and ignore others. Since English doesn't have a formal authority which regulates usage, the "best" English is that which is most clearly understandable.

-T.
 
What we need to teach the young is that there are different language formalities depending on their situation.

When on the Internet (I still capitalize Internet because I was taught to), it's ok to use abbreviations. When writing an application for a job or a resume, it's not ok.

I have a hard time reading some posts on the Internet because it takes me a while to figure out what the acronyms stand for. (ROFLMAO took me quite a while to figure out.)

It's the same thing with "Ebonics". It's fine and perfectly acceptable to use your local slang in your community and with your friends. But, there is something to be said for understanding that having a common language is important. It isn't racist or discriminatory to expect that Americans are able to speak and write proper English.

As a teacher, if I were to receive a paper with all kinds of Internet abbreviations, I'd flunk it immediately. It's not about the person who uses it. It's about the person who uses it and his/her ability to communicate with the receiver of the message. People who insist on using their dialect or their abbreviations have every right to do so. But, they aren't concerned about anyone else. They're selfish.

A4A
 
I have yet to hear somebody just say "LOL" (instead of laughing at a joke), but it's probably heading that way. First time I saw somebody say "k" I thought it means KISS instead of OK. I haven't heard anybody just say "brb" when they were going away briefly (like to the bathroom, or to grab a bag of nachos) either...but it's prolly coming to that.
 
WTF? OMG you don't think that people talk the way they write anyway, do you? Nobody ever talked the way D. H. Lawrence writes, or Henry James, or James Joyce, or Mickey Spillane.

Look, amici miei, there are all kinds of varieties of English, suitable for different times, places, and occasions. Sorry, but I refuse to believe that kids who use -- whatever it's called -- when text messaging, use the same dialect when they write their term papers. If anything, the papers tend to be written in a stiff, overly formal style, which they have to be broken of. K?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top