The sweetest essay on language that you'll ever read

My good friend Rowan was inspired (special thanks to our society) to write this short but awesome essay; and then he let me post it on here because Facebook's chat box wasn't built for sustaining rants. Read and be nourished.

“Punch the keys, damn it!” - by Rowan Thorpe

Finding Forrester had it right: while writing, one must indeed punch the keys. This is true not only of the typewriter but also of the laptop. I, at least, find the need to be very noisy when I write. I’m not sure why this is; I just find it gratifying. But perhaps the thing that I miss most is the ability to express myself in my own words – not to have to muzzle my expression while being around those who constantly require the definitions for my words. 

The requirement to explain myself is annoying and almost degrading to the other person; I feel as though I belittle such people as I speak to them. I know that this notion is incorrect, and I am aware that, in truth, I am in fact expanding their mind and their vocabulary by educating them in the art of the English language, both in diction and in knowledge. Yet still I feel almost aloof, and so I do what I must to avoid the long and mind-numbing explanations that come with speaking at my level of language. I tone down my vocabulary to the lowest level, the lowest common denominator, so that all might understand. I’m not sure that everyone can appreciate this dilemma. I fear that it is one only experienced by those who have been brought up to love the English language and appreciate its finer points, to be able to argue it down to the definitions of words and why one should use one word instead of another when addressing certain types of people or making an argument in a certain arena.

Some might say that I’m an English snob, and there is a certain truth to that. I cringe when I hear “th” pronounced “f” or those who mumble, mispronounce or otherwise mutilate the mother tongue. It bugs me that people do not take enough care to communicate effectively with their speech, let alone the murderous way they portray the English language on common social media websites, especially when they are trying to make a point that they wish people to take seriously, or indeed when they are commenting on a major life event. These are the times when accurate and precise language are needed so that all might share in the news or appreciate a strongly held belief.

Now it is true that language evolves, changes and grows. But what we are currently witnessing is more unto the reduction of language foreseen by Mr Orwell is his Novel 1984 – we are killing language, reducing its form and size until we are left with a strange mutilation involving numerals and symbols, to the point that a person living 50 years ago would not understand the diatribes polluting the internet, and as such our common use of the English language, so that we all lose our extended ability to both recall and use words, words, words, as Shakespeare once put it.

Read this book.

This loss, therefore, is suffered not only by me but also by the public at large as we bring up children who not only use acronyms to describe how they are feeling in online situations but have started to use these same acronyms in everyday “speech” going as far to say LOL rather than laughing and to say BRB rather than the full version, be right back, for fear that the extra half second it costs them may in some way be massively detrimental to their life and that they may miss some experience because they uttered a fully formed sentence rather than the only slightly shorter and yet far less descriptive one. And some would say even more heinous acronyms, like WBU, that they have become accustomed to using. And all the while English loses so much of its expression to the point that one must oft even define ‘acronym’ itself to the very culprits who use them as common place language, as they know not what they do.

This sad predicament that we now find ourselves in is largely due to technology. The very thing designed to make our lives easier, better and more knowledgeable has had the opposite effect, culling the language of Shakespeare, of Milton and of Wilde to a state where none of those giants would be able to recognise it, let alone read it.

Perhaps in punching the keys all too often we have killed the very thing we were trying to create – not by a thousand paper cuts; but instead, by a million million strokes of the keys, we have stabbed and typoed our way into a pseudo English scarecely worthy of our predecessors.

Perhaps we should all put down the laptops and pick up a pen every now and again, open a book instead of waiting for the movie to come out and speak – though speak with elegance it would, like those who came before us.