Peevish

Let me preface this with the assertion that I am not in a generally pessimistic mood. It just happens that two rather curmudgeonly thoughts have occurred to me within the space of a week and I have decided to record them for all the world to have the potential to see if they were so inclined to google appropriate terms and inexplicably stumble upon this backwater blog.

That being shorter than most prefaces I have to read I will lengthen this post with an introduction and perhaps a note on the text. Well perhaps not the latter. That would be a little pretentious, I believe. However, I shall introduce this topic by stating that people are inept. Well perhaps I should have left that for the body of the entry but it serves well as an introduction too. Now on to the body of this entry.

It should come as no surprise to the thinking mind that with the burgeoning numbers of electronic means of communication involving the written word (or perhaps I should say the typed word), shortcuts, slang and means of expressing one's true emotions would pop up. And so they have. Emoticons and new 'words' like lol are now entrenched in the vocabulary of the modern delinquent. MSNisms are seeping into the rest of the language. Despite the push for the descriptive rather than prescriptive approach to linguistics I cannot help feeling that this degrades the language.

Be that as it may I have little to complain about concerning what I have mentioned above when compared with the inanity shown by those people who, in order to express the lengthening of a word for emphasis, multiply the wrong letters in the word. For example, if one were to take the word 'sweet' and attempt to express how the word is lengthened (as when used as a sign of approbation), the logical result would be something like: 'sweeeeet' (with more or fewer 'e's depending on the length desired). Even to the non-linguist it is quickly evident that vowels are the sounds formed by our vocal chords and are thus easier to maintain. Likewise it is phonetically impossible to lengthen the amount of time in which the 't' is pronounced since most consonants are a one-shot deal. So were I to write my lengthened 'sweet' out thus: 'sweetttttt' even the simplest child would quickly see that the sound represented is the word 'sweet' with a bunch of stuttered 't's following. Yet why to do I see similar consonantal lengthening in numerous wall postings and other texts of this, our venerable computer age? Do the writers actually take the time to sound out what word they have just spelled?

Almost worst are those who lengthen silent letters as in 'pokeeeeee'. Are they really trying to express something along the lines of 'pokie'? Utterly ridiculous. The only way in which I can account for this phenomenon while maintaining the sense of this new generation is to posit that their keyboards are sticking and the letters appear like that out of no conscious thought from the typist.
Let us hope (for the sake of this perverse generation) that this latter is the case.