On the decline of the English language...
 

Begin Rant:

It's gotten bad. I'm not even talking about the internet-speak, or the chat-room speak. I expect lax standards of communication in a place like this. I expect teenage girls to drop punctuation when SMSing. I expect my bo'sun's mates to be illiterate. That's normal.

What's not normal is an e-mail from the affectionately named "Bunny Pancake Office" that's unreadably dense with acronyms, mixed metaphors, and implied subjects. These are paid professionals, people whose livelihood depends on being able to communicate their brilliance with other people. I haven't understood any of their e-mails since day one.

The implied subject is definitely my favorite, as it lends itself to all sorts of interpretation. For example, let's say that you're writing about a major conversion of business plans from one organizational format to another. Aside from all the meaningless junk about building "straw men," or "running up the flagpole see who salutes," you need to express the idea that there will be some redundant work in some parts of the process. But instead of saying "This plan will require some duplicative effort," you just say, "Will require some duplicative effort." What will require duplicative effort? What's the subject? Can I make one up to fill in the obvious blank? "Joe's Bunny Rabbit Farm will require some duplicative effort" is as logical of a guess as any, I figure. It's almost like a fun game, now! :)

But it isn't just subjects that are disappearing. Check out this sentence: "Much resistance re-programming TPC cover QLA shortfalls, why re-distribution decision has NOT been made yet." What? :confused:

(sigh)

End Rant.

Sound judgment inclines me to keep a low profile on this one. :D

Samples of actual e-mails sent by an external support person:

Example #1
Example #2
Needless to say, this person did not last long.

All your subject are belong to us.

DJ, I agree with you. In addition to the serious dearth of formal grammatical skills among most of the population, the absence of punctuation or capitalization often makes it difficult to figure out what the writer is trying to communicate.

I think the reason for this is that email has taken the place not of snail mail, but of the telephone. As a result, people just don't put the same thought and time into composing their replies.

Finally, I feel like the use of emoticons has resulted in the atrophy of the skilled use of irony. Biting sarcasm, however, has picked up on the Internet, probably due to anonymity. One of my favorite Ernest Hemingway quotations is: "Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you not to drink so much." Appying that maxim to the Internet, I think one should always question whether one would say the same thing if the discussion were being held in person, which is another reason I don't use a pseudonym.

Anyway, nice rant, and nice examples. With any luck, the absence of writing skills, in the selecting environment of business communications, will tend to disappear over time.

Above text in German:
Above German text translated back into English.

John:

Was that an electronic translation? The German is as unintelligble as the second English version.

Yes, it was electronically translated both into German and back into English.

Often I think this process is applied to outgoing business emails!

That's truly absurd.

There's a car dealer in Germany that I have some dealings with from time to time who can be found at:

www.auto-salon-singen.de (not sure how to link this)

They translate all their vehicle descriptions electronically - and the result is utterly bizarre.

Language has always been a fluid thing, morphing and blending as two langages come into contact. Used to be this would occur as tribes walked around then as ships sailed and then as planes flew. I like to believe that these mixes are good with the caveat that an undelying structure be mainted; that standards are still kept.

But currently, the mediums for language transmission are not physical, it is all electronic and immediate. Take television, the internet and text messaging, mix in all the "normal" languages one can imagine, add in slang languages such as ebonics or chatroom shorthand, toss in a blender and frappe for the last ten years. You end up with the language mess we have. And then toss in to what you are referring as specialized languages that the military, NASA and folks like Boeing create based on ackronyms. My father, sister and brother-in-law all work at Boeing. They all have six-inch thick binders of ackronym definitions. And the contents of all three binders are different. I cannot see how this is a functional way to operate.

Arcsine, you're dead-on right with the specialized language problem. Civilians think I speak "Navy," which isn't technically true. I'm fluent in several dialects of "Navy Submarine," including Nuclear Power, Communications, and Navigation. I understand very little "Naval Aviator" language. I'm also rapidly gaining fluency in a lesser-known tongue, "Navy Legal." There are a lot more acronyms and numbers, though much of the language is far more precisely detailed. I was on the phone with a submariner the other day and forgot which language I was speaking, and failed to translate from Legal into Submariner: "I can't accept that ADSEP without a PLR from PSD for the STO." Oops.

And then there's this nonsense from the Bunny-Pancake folks. I can't imagine that these people believe, in some way, that they make sense to anyone. Bizarre.

Our nanny just got her first real job after graduating from the University of Washington. Great, execept that she cannot write in
english. I was looking over her shoulder one day.....I was just shocked.

What the hell are they teaching these youngins?

where did I see that before???

all your base? http://www.planettribes.com/allyourbase/

Beats the heck out of me, man. I spent some time tutoring at a middle school last year. Mostly I helped with Math and Physics, but occasionally kids would ask me to proofread their writing. I thought my sailors had awful writing skills! These kids put my sailors to shame -- minimal punctuation or capitalization, sentence structure so wildly off-the-wall that it didn't make any sense, sentence length varying from "run on" to "incomplete ..." There were many papers that would have been better off with a Random Word Generator!

What's worse, I'd start in on correcting these poor misguided youth, and they'd stop me: "Oh, it really isn't worth that much thought -- the teacher doesn't read them anyway." :confused: :confused: :confused: Then they'd show me old papers they had written that were just as bad with neat little grades at the top -- B+, A-, whatever.

What a nightmare. Is this beyond fixing?

I work at a university and the writing skills demonstrated here by students is pretty poor. Not beyond fixing but would take a decade to turn around.

like, whatever.

Gary,

I attended said university. Back then English 101 was more about learning to use these new-fangled computers than it was about learning english. Looks like things haven't changed much over the years.:(

Dude like U no you like got 2 lighten up dude U no I got like video games to play dude cant B wastin time on dumnazz homework dude.

The thing is the maxim "***** in-***** out" comes into play. I feel the incomming students are not as fascile with language so unfortunately things have changed.