bling is not a word for those in their late fifties. actually, come to think of it, i don’t know who should really be allowed to use it.

i have no problem with the evolution of the english language, and in terms of speaking, regional idioms & new usages fascinate me

however, i do have a problem with what i see as the loss of real written communication through recognizeable words rather than with symbols and abbreviations and anagrams and what have you

i work with “kidz” who IM eachother all day long but honestly can’t formulate a complete written sentence

With much respect to the author thereof, I’m not sure I agree with the above comment.

A good many of the words we use now are “misspellings”, contractions, or out-and-out bastardizations of earlier terms. One that immediately springs to mind is “goodbye” a contraction of “God be with you”. I’m sure, if they’d had blogs a few hundred years ago there would have been a lot of comments lamenting the fact that hideous, incomprehensible slang terms like “goodbye” are replacing “proper” English…

Same thing with can’t, don’t, won’t… they began life as slang terms used by the upper (read powerful/wealthy/lazy) classes and eventually filtered “down” to the masses. Nobody would accuse one of using “slang” if one said “I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand what the kids are saying these days…”

Unless a language has been pronounced completely dead, it’s a living, evolving thing; and it evolves through the tension between people who think they’re speaking “properly” and those who introduce their own terms into the language to distinguish themselves from the norm. Right now, our language is beeing bombarded with new terms from “the Internet” and from the (typically poorer) “urban” classes. These days, slang terms tend to filter “up” rather than “down” – and I suspect that this is what annoys some people more than anything (not anyone posting or commenting on this blog, of course!). 100, 200 years from now, the way we speak now – our “proper” English – will sound ancient and strange to “tha kidz” ;)

That said, “getting Jiggy wit it” should definitely be banned! It’s just wrong!

what is happening to language? many people today communicate almost entirely in abbreviations and anagrams, lol, rotfl, wtf, how many hundred other colloquial phrases shrunken down to the first letters of the words? oh yes by all means let’s turn contemporary idioms into abbreviations and then the abbreviations into psuedo-standardized communication, my my what a brilliant anecdote to illiteracy.

we are entering a dark age.