Small Town News

LULZ: U cNt B4 rEaL

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"My Mother is against Nancy Reagan's 'Say No to Drugs' campaign," Jay Leno once quipped, "she thinks that's just rude. It should be 'Say No Thank You to Drugs."

What has us thinking about a punctilious joke from the 1980s is a literacy program that gives away bicycles to encourage reading in our schools.

That would be ironic if it wasn't so necessary.

Modern communications like Twitter and cellular telephone messaging encourage reading and writing among our youth, but they have also mark a new low in written communications.

The instantaneous nature of these vehicles, combined with their self-imposed character limits, continue to degrade our language but more importantly, our ability to understand each other.

Tweets and texts allow only 140 and 160 characters (including punctuation and spaces) respectively per use, which is, in traditional language, about 10 words.

In response to these limitations, tech-society has created their own abbreviated language. Even our potential presidential candidates sound like children when tweeting. In fairness, some of them sound like

children when they're talking, but written communication is a higher art and is meant to have permanence.

If Shakespeare were texting Hamlet it would read: 2 b r not 2 b. And that is the question: to suffer the slings and arrows of abbreviated communication when we know it dooms our ability to understand each other?

There is good and bad in this.

Good in that our kids

are reading and writing (hooray) and bad in that such communication further exacerbates our attention deficit problem.

It literally (pun intended) and necessarily eliminates words like exacerbates and punctilious.

It replaces them with upside down smiley faces and ignorance.

There is relief out there: buy a book or take pen and paper in hand and write a letter



Copyright 2011 Shelton-Mason County Journal, Shelton, Washington. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from SmallTownPapers, Inc.

© 2011 Shelton-Mason County Journal Shelton, Washington. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from DAS.

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