Do we even speak the same language?
I'm tired of the blank, questioning stares. Most often, when people discover my true major, they look at me as if I am throwing my life away. Yes, it is true, I am not a Computer Science major, but rather am focusing on a career in the hallways—I confess to the charge; I am an English-Education major. My (hopeful) career does not imply a complete disinterest in the other, more popularly suggested major, however, and occasionally I even manage to tie both fields together into one column. Today is such a day.
With the onset of the Internet, and especially the rise of its popularity since the Dot Com era, the English language has withstood a barrage of new terms. Even excluding the technical jargon (binary, blog, Ethernet, flux capacitor, etc...) we're still stuck with a plethora of new, exciting words. Case in point: how many times have you asked someone to "Google it," or overheard a confession of one's intention to "blog about this."
Did our predecessors foresee the day "surfing" could take place not only inside, but while sitting motionless in front of a mechanical box? Did they plan on cute, furry rodents translating into metal-plastic hunks of navigation equipment?
Who told the general public they had the right to destroy the natural order of our language? There must have a time somewhere, sometime when a rational being went crazy with the illogical hijacking of words and phrases, the transposing of meaning from innocent to technical.
It doesn't stop, there, though. The same evil person who created the Internet—Al Gore—also gave the Secret Society the power to not only introduce new terms and words and mutilate existing ones, but also allowed for the infiltration of non-words. I could handle them on a computer screen, but the day I first heard an audible LOL... it was almost too much.
Almost as much as when I heard a public service announcement on PBS to our parents: Do you know what your children are saying? Of course you don't, it isn't English anymore!
There is hope, however. I stand by the road, wincing every time I hear net-lingo used in actual conversation; cringing at every instance of language murder. Some day the end will come, just as it did for Beanie Babies. Eventually the fad will wear off, people will remember they actually can type entire words, and the world will go back to being a happy, safe, sane place to live.
Meanwhile, I long for the good days, days of cheerful, happy browsing... in those days, we were free to use any search engine we deemed worthy of our attention: Yahoo, AltaVista, even Lycos if you had to stoop that low. Everyone used ICQ, a chat service gone by the wayside in favor of MSN and AIM, and if you didn't know what a megabyte was, you probably didn't know how to double-click, either. We didn't need fancy words or acronyms, we stuck to the language of the people.
We could surf and browse and search and click, completely ignorant of what our actions were doing to the world. (Of course, "we" were also banished to the corner and referred to as "smelly" and "losers.") How I miss those days. They were good times. Had I known better, though, I would have traded my mouse for a surfboard before you can type LOL.