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Attack of d sms
SMS SEEMS to be the all-encompassing solution when you want to let your friend know you'll be an hour late, have to remind your son to buy the flour on his way home, or want to convey a little love message during class without the risk of being caught passing chits. For most people with cell phones, SMS is a fantastic way to communicate. Subodh, an advertising professional, says, "It allows you to get to the point without having to call up and go through the hello-how-are-you small talk." But why must words be shortened, and vowels and hyphens dropped?
"Just because I have a cell doesn't mean I'm a rich dude," says Suguna. "SMS costs money and if I can tell all in 200 short words and 30 paisa, it's stupid to send five messages just to guard grammar." Neema, an NGO worker, says: "We try to squeeze in as much information as possible in one message, so words do get scrunched up." Neema admits that she was initially enraged at what she used to call "the crippling of English". But in her case too, functionality won over aesthetics.
Devika Chandran, a teacher , says that SMS and e-mail language have even percolated into school assignments. But she says she saw this coming a long time ago: "When we chose to put the triangular dots to represent `therefore' after proving a maths theorem, and when we wrote `No.' instead of `number', it was a sign. Words do get shortened due to high usage. What's wrong in that?" Most of us SMSers also sweep out the conjunctions and sentence connectors in our messages. So something like this — movie at 1230? my chair crookd. u hv my cd. pls return — is not the spewing of a person with an acutely low attention span, but a way to say it all in one go.
Naveen Halemane, who's doing a doctoral thesis on a linguistic approach to e-English, thinks that these `deviations' must not be considered mistakes. "They might be grammatically wrong now, but who is to say language cannot be dynamic," he argues. But as a new digitally literate class is taking away the power to shape and define language from the likes of teachers and newspaper editors, one wonders if we should absorb `brb's and `gnite's into the English language. Language and the lexicon are evolving so rapidly that whenever a new word is encountered, one will have to Ask Jeeves or check with Google to be sure that it is not an ad hoc fabrication. But now, the ever useful (and comforting to many) Concise Oxford English dictionary has included `GR8', `emoticon', `RUOK', etc. in its newer editions.
David Crystal, in his book Language and the Internet dismisses the common view that online communication (he calls it Netspeak) is illiterate and dumbs down language. Much of it is non-standard, playful, phonetic, tolerant of typographic and spelling errors, and full of new words. But he is fascinated by its evolving character, variety, and innovation. He says that it "is a linguistic singularity — a genuine new medium".
ROHINI MOHAN
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