English is taking a heavy beating these
days. With the advancement of technology, sub-cultures have developed and in
the age of smart phones and instant chat messengers, a new language has grown.
Any hope of English surviving is lost. It is so far down the drain, it is now
floating down the River Mandovi.
Kids and a sizeable number of adults seem
fond of cutting down on supposedly “irrelevant” letters when it comes to
communication. ‘You’ has become ‘u’. ‘For’ has become ‘4’. And uneducated has
become popular. The reason cited is that it saves time. The 0.25 seconds you
would have used to type the whole word out can now be used for putting your
hand back on the steering wheel and driving like a normal person; the kind of
person who doesn’t put tyre tracks on other people.
It gets better. If you think it’s just
saving time in texting, it has also crept into the spoken word. I’ve heard them
say their burgers were ‘delish’. What happened to the ‘cious’? Did it slip down
your baggy pants? The clients we deal with have become ‘profesh’
(professional). And the new track by ‘biebs’ is extra ‘spesh’. Have you heard
of ‘whatevs’? It’s ‘whatever’, but the ‘er’ at the end, like a college degree
apparently, has become totally unnecessary.
Then you have the issue with emoting.
There’s everybody’s favourite LOL (an acronym for Laugh Out Loud for those of
you stuck in the 18th century). I hate LOL. I’d prefer a ‘that’s funny!’ or
even ‘haha’. There’s also LMAO (Laughing My Ass Off) and ROFL (Rolling On the
Floor Laughing). If we’re really honest with ourselves, at the most, the sender
chuckled a bit, if you’re lucky. Nobody has collapsed in laughter, picked up
their phone amidst all that hysteria and typed out ROFL just so you know the
effect it had on them. Of course, these days, you have enough of emoticons to
describe your emotional self.
None of them are used to communicate
anything that resembles a sentence, but that doesn’t matter. Let me give you an
example of a text chat.
Bertie: Hey, how are you?
Friend: (Thumbs up), (heart), (monkey),
(musical notes).
Bertie: You’re great? But you’re in love
with a monkey in a rock band?
Friend? Lol. Whatevs.
Ooh, then… then some enterprising people
have gone on to mash two words together, to mean the same thing as the original
word. Why? I think it’s because of all the free time they earned when texting.
So, ‘gigantic’ and ‘enormous’ have now spawned the word ‘ginormous’. Which, by
the way, is a longer word than the original two. “Whoa, that’s a ginormous F on
your report card.” would be an example on how to use that word. I’ve even heard
the word ‘ridonkulous’ being used. Which is the result of mixing the words
‘ridiculous’ and… who knows, ‘donkey’ perhaps? The best way to explain
‘ridonkulous’ is that it’s ridiculously ridiculous.
But you can’t go around saying the words
‘ridiculously ridiculous’. No no. People might look at you funny. So you say
‘ridonkulous’ instead; that will solve the issue.
Finally, the word that has been really
overused and abused is ‘like’. “The DJ is like, so like, awesome. When he like,
plays my jam (which means favourite track, not real jam) I just wanna, like,
die and stuff.” You don’t need any of those likes in your sentence. Throw them
away. All of them. It will still make sense. Well, sort of.
Have any other words that should be given
the lethal injection? Tweet me. I’ll, like, sign a petition. Lol.
