I get your point, @Exapno_Mapcase , and I don’t entirely disagree, particularly on the important distinction between spoken and written language. But I do feel obliged to do a bit of devil’s advocate work here.
If the Great Democratization of the written word enabled by the internet now gives writers the freedom to write in any way they please, in a manner solely intended to please themselves, it should surely also give their luckless beleagered readers the freedom to criticize their writing when it’s atrociously bad. To say that the internet abounds in terrible writing is rather an understatement; atrociously bad writing is practically the currency of social media and the lesser blogs. Writing that ranges from hard to read to entirely incomprehensible, verging on functional illiteracy, is not something that should be celebrated as liberation from the “tyranny” of the style manual.
Which is why there are hundreds of sites on the web, many of them associated with major reference works like dictionaries, that offer writing tips and grammar instruction. There is no more reason to suppose that any random writer will statistically be any better at his craft than any random participant in any other endeavour requiring some level of skill, especially if they haven’t been adequately trained. In fact, probably less so, because artists like musicians, singers, and painters generally go into their field after they’ve already demonstrated some intrinsic capacity for it, whereas everybody tries to write, even those who think that “their”, “there”, and “they’re” are completely interchangeable.
I agree with the first two parts of what you’re saying, but I’m not sure I agree with the third. If you mean that they have to be picked up naturally, and that toddlers are able to do so, then I agree. If you’re referring to the rules that must be explicitly taught, I disagree.
In general, a rule is a good rule if learning it doesn’t decrease your ability to communicate, and it’s a rule worth learning if it increases your ability to communicate.
Many of the “rules” in this thread only decrease the ability to communicate. If you’re the recipient of a message, and you know a rule that makes you annoyed at idiomatic speech, but if you didn’t know the rule you’d understand the speech just fine, then it’s a bad rule.
“Write to your audience” is a bit of advice that has been bandied about for decades. The Great Democracy, to use your term, does that instinctively. The formality of expression that you or I would prefer is often anathema. Textspeech* is geared toward writers and readers who use two thumbs to fashion bits of communication at the greatest speed possible. I was fascinated to learn that K was preferable over OK and that ending a sentence with a period was considered rude. (“OK, Boomer.” captures both.) Lately, I’ve seen discussion about the variable meanings of ha. haha comes across differently from ha, hahaha, and HAHAHA. Each has a value that compactly expresses a certain emotive reaction to the original text.
Such a fantastic new language cannot help but creep over the borders into spoken and written English. People complained about verbing nouns, now an everyday commonplace, and certainly people will complain about textspeech rearing its incomprehensible head into places where it “shouldn’t”. Yet it is inevitable. Nor can it be dismissed as mere slang, although cant might be a better term.
How does one learn textspeech? Presumably by deep immersion. Of course classes and instruction exist for learning formal language; a need for formal language continues to exist. Textspeech will not replace it. Yet the democratization of language that it represents is demonstrably infiltrating the more formal speech. As usual with language complaints, the complainers don’t know their history. People have been complaining about the democratization of language for a hundred years. Fowler tried to battle it back in 1926. Few good writers today would want to write by his precepts, though; they feel fusty and outmoded. Language proceeds apace. Rant against the pace, not the process. (Don’t hate the player, hate the game.)
You’re focusing on textspeech here but let me ask a different question. You mentioned verbing nouns, but how about nouning verbs, which brought to mind the infamous “ask” noun of biz-speak. What’s your opinion of the following examples of pseudo-English from the realm of biz-speak?
The reason I ask is that this sort of pretension beloved by high-priced business executives has been widely and quite properly ridiculed, yet for some reason the same linguistic aberrations when promulgated by young people is supposed to be just the natural evolution of language. Yet both are motivated by exactly the same human inclinations to define membership in an in-group and distinguish themselves from the common riff-raff. And lest you argue that biz-speak is just fine, let me tell you that I once had to endure sessions with a certain corporate VP wherein I literally did not understand half of the jargon he was bloviating – and I’m not exaggerating.
I wish I could remember some of it but I’m mercifully blanking on it. But here are some examples that I just made up that all incorporate the common jargon of biz-speak:
What is the ask here? Have you run it up the flagpole?
We have to leverage our core competencies and drill down on the issues …
We have to take this offline and level-set our expectations …
Do you have buy-in from the stakeholders on the new paradigm?
We’re reaching out to everyone to empower blue-sky thinking and promote bleeding-edge practices …
The key takeaways that the tiger team brings to the table are a game changer …
Put this action item on the back burner for now as we don’t have the bandwidth …
Our new mission statement will break down the silos, get stakeholder buy-in, and reduce churn
Perhaps not exactly this distinction, but saying Je ne sais pas, Je sais pas and Je ne sais are possible, and carry shades of register and connotation that English cannot express easily.
“Mission statement” isn’t originally business-speak - it’s one of many, many expressions that the corporate world borrowed from the military. (Think of all those new recruits in the rank and file, doing grunt work in the trenches and on the front lines, hoping to one day earn their stripes and join the top brass.)
My wife, before she retired, would occasionally drop words and phrases that would baffle me although she insisted they were common biz-speak.
I wasn’t the audience. You weren’t the audience. People in business and various sub-businesses were the audience. I don’t see why biz-speak has any less validity or prestige than the cant or argot or jargon of other groups that linguists have traced back for centuries.
The criticism and mockery arose when the speakers tried pushing the in-language to a larger audience who was not familiar with the terms nor allowed in to the meetings where they played a role in shorthand communication. As that should be, just as if raw textspeech made it into SEC filings.
BTW, “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it” dates back to the ad-man speak of the 1950s. Stan Freburg deliciously satirized it in 1961 by having George Washington take Betsy Ross’ new flag and saying the phrase. Freberg later became one of the greatest and most imaginative advertising writers of all time. He knew the spoken and written languages and the argots and jargons and was almost uniquely able to excel in all.
Fair enough, but that’s not really my point. The point in this context is how “mission statement” has become sanctified as a corporate mantra whose principal attribute is that it contains a sequence of impressive-sounding words whose totality has absolutely no meaning, whether actionable, practical, or even aspirational. It’s just a string of words. This has been my problem with biz-speak in general for decades. In everyday use, its intentional obfuscation of plain meanings just makes it that much worse. This is not language evolution – it’s teen-speak by overpaid middle-aged wannabe teenagers.
I disagree, but I guess that depends on how broadly you want to define “in-group”. This nonsensical jargon is commonplace in shareholder meetings, earnings calls, and press conferences, well beyond the confines of corporate offices.
ETA: Here’s something I posted in another thread a few months ago, a statement to the media by the president of the Coca-Cola company:
I was just reading an article about some of the Coca-Cola Company’s plans for 2023, and the quote from the president of Coke reminded me of the above, and the many other posts I’ve made about how much I loathe biz-speak. Here is what he said – it’s all biz-speak, but the part I bolded is the best:
“Package innovation takes a bigger role,” when shoppers are worried about spending, CEO James Quincey said Tuesday during an analyst call discussing third-quarter results. “We will be approaching ’23 with a broad innovation agenda, but with some slight weighting to packaging.”
“It’s about extending the price ladder,” Quincey said, “making sure the entry price point … becomes as low down in the price spectrum, the actual out-of-pocket, as possible.”
What the hell does this mean?
Here is a translation of exactly what he meant, in English instead of biz-speak:
“Consumers are trying to spend less, so we’ll be offering versions of our products that will be cheaper because they’ll contain less product.”
You’re my new hero. I loathe biz-speak (and its cousin, development-speak), in large part because I have witnessed first hand how they insidiously work their way into common usage:
First, some pundit (excuse me, “thought leader”) who is trying to sound original comes up with a novel word or phrase to describe something that is, nine times out of ten, a common sense concept that is already well understood.
Second, people in positions of power, who believe that part of being credible and/or climbing the organizational ladder is peppering their speech with the newest jargon, start using the novel term.
Third, the underlings of the boss start adopting the term, taking their cue from their superior.
If the pundit is influential enough, and steps two and three are repeated often enough, the new jargon becomes established, event though it is in fact entirely unnecessary.
I had two bosses - one an unredeemable jerk, the other a really nice guy - who both loved being early adopters of trendy terms. It drove me mad. (And since the nice guy could take it, I teased him about it constantly.)
Now I am retired, though still active as a volunteer in the local non-profit I used to run. My replacement is overall quite good, but she too has a penchant for adopting trendy terminology, which looks like a mark of insecurity to me. I don’t mind her saying “burn rate” too much, but if she says one more time that she is going to “activate our space” I might have to slap her.
I accept that many, many people use ‘literally’ in a way that to me, makes no sense.
What I don’t understand is how the odd usage became so prevalent on the Dope. Yes, many people use the word to mean something other than what it actually means but why do Dopers do that? Can’t we, here in our own Private Idaho, use the word in a sensible manner? No one will shame us, I promise.
Which is similar to the reason I don’t care for people using ambiguous or unknown initialisms.
Write whatever you want but you can’t expect people to know what you’re talking about when you use words / phrases / initialisms that they do not know. This is why it always throws me off. I just don’t understand why people would choose to write ambiguously.
