MALICE, MALEVOLENCE & ANARCHY

School term is finally over, those of us practicing the noble profession through which professionals for other careers are churned out know how hectic last week was, with exams and marking! I am surprised primary school kids are writing better compositions than so many secondary school students. My heart now bleeds for that teenager who can barely construct a correct sentence in correct English nor Kiswahili sanifu.

We know too well where the rain started beating, social media!  The impacts of social media on language are far reaching. Like a cancerous malignancy, our wanton language use on social media has not spared any vital organ of the English language from the syntax to semantics! Through social media we are destroying the concrete on which writers base their great works of art we all enjoy to read. So serious is the problem that at my age I can no longer decipher what some of my friends are trying to say in text messages, hangouts, tweeter and Facebook.

I can bet that whoever came up with the idea of a 140 character limit wanted to ensure that there is fun in sending clear and concise tweets, without rambling on or being verbose. What have we done instead? We have taken advantage of the situation, we have shamelessly wrecked grammar, and we have reduced ourselves into a throng of simpletons committing all sorts of atrocities against the queen’s dialect. You may describe language as liquid or dynamic prone to change anytime. This change might be anytime but not anyhow. As a student of linguistics I appreciate this; indeed all languages do change but some of the changes in question are just unjustifiable and uncalled for.

Vowels have suddenly been rendered useless! How do you omit all the vowels of a word? Doesn’t your conscience tell you something isn’t right? You are about to tell me it’s because you want to maximize on your 140 characters, right? What about those who substitute i with y, like in phylosophy? Thanks to social media, a good number of students and young professionals can no longer spell simple words even in academic and formal writing. Even with the ubiquitous presence of spell checks and auto corrects in our devices which are apparently smarter than the users, we still force these mistakes into all our writings.

I am told that  preceded by a hashtag has a new meaning apart from being successful while two strange bed fellows, epic and fail have been married! Such profligacy with language is illicit! The two nations to which English can be said to be native are commonly referred to by their acronyms. The same acronymy has now boomeranged on language, clearly lol and omg were just an indication of danger that was looming. Today I see whole sentences reduced into an acronym, needless to say I no longer bother to discern what the person is trying to say! Worse still these have been also adopted into normal parlance so that when someone is late for class and the no nonsense professor needs an explanation, the first thing one says is OMG! Such people should thank God am not their professor! I now understand why my friends are confused by their BFs, GFs, BFFs, FWBs and any others I might have forgotten. Words have been fragmented in the guise of shortening in such a way that they are no longer intelligible. Others have just been deliberately spelt wrongly for no particular reason, that’s how serious the escalation of anarchy and impunity has become in the use of English. I am yet to find the correct words to describe dolts who are x instead of s and k as a reply that means okay, if I guessed right.

Language:Stop this madness

As I confess having committed some of these heinous crimes against language, I must mention that for quite some time now I have completely exonerated myself from such barbarisms as the use of moronic and mutant lexical units with no semantic bearing. Every time I witness this idiocy, read a vapid colloquial, every time I receive vowel-less word-husks in a text message, I wonder what our successors will make of the troglodytes we are, who will(by then) have irreparably polluted the beauty of the English language! Clearly social media is a bitter pill to swallow, sociologists will tell you there is more to worry about other than language. As you embrace this mutant and unintelligible language; netspeak, fingered speech, chat speech or whatever other name it has been baptised, take caution lest it boomerangs on you. But before you get there be sure to open those two links (I cannot overemphasize how factual the information there is!). The English language is desperate for justice! The only way tou can dispense justice is by following grammar and spelling rules.  Otherwise I hope I will not have a BFF soon, Best Friends Funeral; apana!