The themes of love and hate are presented in act 3 scene 1. Ceasar is assassinated in the Capitol. Love is presented when when the last word that comes out of Caesar’s mouth is “Ceasar!”. The love that Caesar has for himself is clear as the cliché for dying words is along the lines of ‘tell my wife, I love her’. Shakespeare wanted to represent Caesar’s arrogance and Caesar as a character overall in his last words.
In 2007, you wrote an article exposing your paranoia and anxiety towards the future of language and the effect texting and abbreviations will have on it. I understand that you wrote your article in 2008, approximately eight years ago where the future was feared and full of uncertainties. I’m writing in response to your article retrospectively. This allows me to resolve any worries you had and confirm if your fears were correct. A change was something you appeared to be scared of. You may try to deny this but you want the English language not to evolve for your own comfort.
Tradition and habit are different things. A habit is a regular practice or tendency that is difficult to give up. A tradition is a custom that has been practiced from previous generations. Your love and obsession with the Oxford English Dictionary is understandable and relatable with many. The use of the Dictionary is a tradition due to its usefulness. Your hatred for the hyphen being removed from ‘no fewer than 16,000 words’ is pedantic in my opinion. Since the hyphen was removed it stopped being a tradition because it was grammatically incorrect. The habit you developed of typing ‘milli-second’ instead of millisecond may be, with great certainty, due to you being stubborn. I grew up spelling millisecond without a hyphen and if the spelling was to change again I can accept it with an open mind knowing that the change is how our language is evolving. This may be a generational thing. Furthermore, if the meaning or the clarity of the words are at stake, there is no need to make a fuss. Using common sense, everyone knows that a walking stick, which used to be walking-stick, is a stick for walking and not a stick that walks.
Even though the reason for the change is what most annoys you, this is the future. Time is money and characters are also ‘money’. When writing a personal statement, the maximum number of characters was 3,000. Fortunately, I was able to rearrange certain sentences to fit a 4,000 plus character personal statement into a 3,000 character limit. I didn’t have enough characters spare to write hardworking as hard-working (with a hyphen). This update to the English language could be seen as a positive if we look for it. Now I can confidently hand my personal statement in, knowing that I was able to fit in all the characters that I felt I needed.
Written English will not and has not evolved into something that is unrecognisable compared to 2007. Change is inevitable and that is what is meant to happen. Shakespearean (Jacobean) English is vastly different to modern day English, but Shakespearean (Jacobean) English did guide the journey our language would take to reach us now. Shakespeare invented around 1700 new words that are used in our common day speech. He put words together that would never have joined, he changed nouns into verbs and verbs into adjectives and not forgetting the new words he created entirely.
Language is there so that communication between us is possible. Every person has a different personality, therefore, your relationship with them will be different. You should act accordingly and in a perfect world this would mean the way you talk and write would change.
In certain languages, such as my family’s, Amharic, there are different letters to use with the same sound. You choose to use one of the letters when writing formally and one letter for casually. In English, the structure and vocabulary you use determine the formality.
‘They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped’ This is also one example of your use of hyperbolic language to show your personal opinions which I disagree with. Texting is almost another language is something we agree on. You could say that texting is to English what English is to Latin if Latin were alive and kicking. But texting, with all the emoticons and abbreviations, just wants to live side by side with written English. This is what I think from this day and age. I would also like to add that this metaphor ‘doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago.’ is very exaggerated and detaches the seriousness and barbarousness from Khan’s actions.
There are many reasons why texting is the future of communication and not to be feared. Like you mentioned it is economically more wise to text compared to call. Currently, the trend for communication is to use an application that is compatible with both iOS and android. WhatsApp allows free calls, individual chats or in a group. There is also instant photo and video sharing possibilities. All of this is available on other apps and also require an internet connection. These apps encourage the use of emoticons in chats by making it as easy to post a confused emoticon as is it to post a question mark. Of course, it is possible to type a question mark, but every generation leaves a mark in the arts on this planet. Language is an art and it can be used in various ways. ballerinas don’t tell street dancers that they are moving to the music wrong. Ease of expression is one of the reasons the English language is so popular worldwide.
The fact that I am writing this piece in English and not textspeak demonstrates that you have nothing to worry about. ‘:-)’ (hyphens still have a purpose.)
