Prose, Prose, whr4 art thou, Prose?

I find text message and message board “speak” not only difficult to read but incredibly annoying and sad. A whole generation is growing up with the mistaken belief that “How R U?” is grammatically correct and that misspelled words are totally acceptable because a “message board isn’t a spelling test”. Apparently these electronically charged youth are under the odd misconception that what they learn in school is solely for the purpose of passing a test and matriculating from one grade to another until they finally graduate from some form of “higher education”. Proper spelling and grammar isn’t to be misinterpreted as useful or something that “real” people do in everyday life.

If you love the English language and appreciate well written prose and have not yet had the exasperating experience of attempting to read and understand messages posted on a message board, or your cell phone, I will be happy to supply you with the newest form of communication. Here are but a few examples of which I speak.

RU Gng Out 2Nite? (Are you going out tonight?)

IM ABT2 LV NW BHM B4 UNO IT (I’m about to leave now, be home before you know it.)

K CU (Okay, see you.)

This truncated version of language is showing up not only on message boards, but now you can find them sneaking into e-mail, essays, and other, more formal, forms of writing. I am not the first (and hopefully not the last) to be completely aggrieved at the potential for loss of language skills. The BBC carried an intriguing article not long ago about students and the use of “Text Lingo” in schools (makes me shudder to think on it):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2814235.stm


It would seem that this latest evolution is just the next step in the progressive decline of language. Newspapers took a perfectly good language and created Headlines, Hooks, and Captions. Since television’s advent into our lives, the little talking box has grown in size while its use of the language decreases in value. Today we are subject to Graphic Splash, Buzz Words and Sound Bytes. Literature has changed so dramatically that it is hard to believe that today’s best-selling authors have ever read the likes of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Austen, Bronte, Fitzgerald, or any other purveyor of beautiful words and thoughtful prose.

I wonder, has the written word transformed the reader or have the demands of lazy readers and writers transformed the written word? Where do you think they went, all of those lovely lost words and sentences?

As 4 me, I lng 4t dy wen wrds wr wrds n lang wz lang dat I cud read n wrt w/o a transl8R! drivN me %-)

Nature's Time Machine

It rained last night. It didn’t begin as that gentle, soft, easy rain that lulled me to sleep with my window open. The storm began to the northeast, how odd that seemed, with dark clouds gathering in an inverted bowl shape and bolt lightening hitting just beyond the field of students practicing soccer. I waited impatiently for the kids to run for cover, waited for the teacher to send them in, but they continued the practice. The scene was oddly surreal, as if two photographs had been edited together, each part having no business being attached to the other. The storm, as if minding the teacher, kept its distance from the field until the practice was completed and the students safely inside. Unleashed, the clouds and lightening and thunder and rain all rushed over the field toward the house and we watched in fascinated wonder at Nature’s excited dance of freedom. The air cooled and the breeze filled with a hundred scents, only a few we could identify. By bedtime, the frenzied boogie had calmed to a lovely waltz of soft rain and gentle breezes so that the windows could be opened when the lights were out.

Suddenly I wasn’t in Virginia anymore, I am at home in Glendale the first summer the Dodgers played in L.A.; my window open and the clock radio crackling with the voice of Vin Scully, hearing for the first time the names of Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, Jim Gilliam, Don Drysdale, and Sandy Koufax. Zap! I am the only one awake at my grandmother's house in La Crescenta, reading Photoplay while I listen to the pine trees whipping about outside, the smell of dusty rain in the air. Zing! I am sitting on a screened porch at a Maine cabin near Camden, watching a late summer squall flash across Penobscot Bay.

Time travel by smell, what a glorious trip.