Quoted verbatim from the World of Warcraft official forums:
If you think the balance of trees will be better than it has in the past 5 years then your diluted.
One side-effect of the rise of the Internet has been the birth of a post-literate generation.
In my un-networked youth, writing was something you did for teachers and families. You wrote school projects, stories and essays. You wrote postcards, thank-you notes for presents and the occasional paragraph at the end of a letter. When you did so you made as sure as you could that you got all the words right because an adult was watching, and would usually correct you if you got it wrong.
With the popularity of text-messaging, email, blogging, Internet message-boards, everyone has become a voracious correspondent all at once. The recipients of the messages are peers, not superiors. The feedback loop is broken and anyone who objects is a grammar nazi. When in doubt, it is far more efficient to transliterate what you would say out loud and hope the letters line up than it would be to check if it is correct or not.
Of course we rail against it and hope that by the time people enter serious study or the workforce they are able to write in a way that doesn't embarrass. On the other hand spelling, like pronunciation, has always undergone seismic shifts despite the efforts of purists and dictionary-worshippers to capture the language and encase it in amber.
In short, it might be time to end my almost two-decades-long battle against the confusion of ‘lose’ and ‘loose’.
There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind. – Stephen Fry
As a self-identified "pedantic a**hole," who literally cringes when people get "me vs. I" wrong, I would answer Mr. Fry's observation with a resounding "Yes, I know all about sound-sex." I describe words as Legos, capable of building anything, and as the best toys ever.
My standards for dating have become incredibly low -- at this point they consist of "Breathing, female, native speaker of English." Time spent with a non-native speaker ends up being full of "No, that's not a real word, but it sounds good."
There is no requirement that a person who loves words accept that they be used improperly. Breaking the rules only becomes exciting when one knows the rules exist. If you like, think of your pedantry as enhancing the illicit pleasure of the formerly illiterate.
I have to disagree with Stephen on this one too, and with yourself for giving up so easily.
I am a writer. Yes, I love the sound of words, I love marshalling and mashing and crushing them together into beautiful sentences that sound *great*. I'm also an online writer - I write in this "loosing" internet. I love puns. I love beautiful language. I love clear and concise writing.
And what I have to say to this argument is this: if you take away the correct, exact meaning of words, if you take away their preciseness, then you take away much of the power of language.
Just now I (and you, in the title) made a pun about "loosing internet", using the double-meaning of loosening and losing. This would have been impossible if the language was in fact so loose. Take away preciseness of language, and you take away wit and puns. You take away concise writing. You take away beautiful poetry.
You can't chisel Michelangelo's David with a sledgehammer, no matter how functional and easy to use others find it as a way to break rocks.
I should have used Preview, I knew it.
Please correct "preciseness" into "precision" if you can be bothered :-)
As a pedant from a long line of pedants (or perhaps only a broad line, in that I know my sisters are pedantic but am unsure of my grandparents), I disagree with Stephen Fry on this matter. Those who hate to see English unwittingly abused are often among those who enjoy all things lingual the most. They don't read about its rules because they wish to be able to correct other people (well, okay, a bit), but because they adore language to the extent that they wish to know its intricacies.
And why shouldn't they? Language is the blood of all society. It is *the* most important thing we do, so obsessing about it is not so unhealthy.
Language is a shifting beast,
more sushi-train than static feast.
"Loosing" may replace old "losing".
After all, it rhymes with "choosing".
But I still choose the words I use
and till it's lost it's "lose" I choose.
I'll keep on pointing out misspelling,
quite politely, never yelling.
'coz where I err, I wanna know.
'Tis only thus that I'mma grow
I blame Dr Suess:
Occupations and company distinctly plan on containing early products from papers, magazine publisher publishing houses, TV electronic networks and Hollywood movie studio apartments as the iPad wheels innocent. Just there wasn’t much talk about any of those media products during the launch event.
Surely there's a difference between pedantry and objecting to people witting pure nonsense?
A miss-placed aprostrphe on a greengrocer's sign is hardly comparable to the above example? There's a difference between adding water to something (diluting it) and convincing ones self of an un-truth (delusion), both deluded and diluted are real words with real meanings that are VERY VERY different to each other. As much as the your/you're thing makes me twitch, at least they're phonetically right so when you read the sentence out loud it's inteligable.
I love Stephen Fry, and that quote, but I think you've used it out of context. He was making a spirrited defence of people making new words for things, or combining words in a way that makes sense. The argument being that the whole point is to make yourself understood, so if people understand what it means to action someting then that's fine. But that's not the case here, 'dilute' is a real word that people understand, and it makes no sense what-so-ever in the above sentence.
What we have here is just nonsense and illiteracy, not creativity. It's a person who's serverly challenged in the "making youself understood" ledger!
I think it's important for the future of civilisation that we educate people well enough that they can make themselves understood without without turning every conversation into a puzzle!
I think the internet has produced more literate people in general.
There was a study done (at Harvard I think) comparing the amount of written communication done by the average student today compared to 20 years ago. It was a monumental increase.
Nevertheless, the average literacy of people on the internet has necessarily declined as the people who would not have engaged in what is predominantly a written medium have been forced online by its ubiquity and integration into everyday life. Previously I think it's been more attractive to (a subset of) the more literate and the better educated than it has to everyone else.
But these people are not engaging in writing and reading much more than people would have 20 years ago. Practice writing online is still writing practice.
As further evidence of this witness the relative lack of literacy on youtube as opposed to the average mailing list.
I agree with you about the fact that (as I like to think of it) English is a living language.