Watch Your Language

I remember, not so long ago when I was at school, back when they still had text books, and mail was something you sent to your great aunt Sarah through the 'mailbox' (remember those)? or letter-box if you come from England, which I do, you knew where you were with the English language. You were either really bad at it, or really good.  Words were words and when you got a bit older, you found silly double meanings behind every day things, like (door) 'knob' relating to a certain male part.  But that was pretty much the extent of it. 

Oh, innocent days...

I remember also how 'Twitter' was something annoying little birds did outside your window on a Saturday morning at 5.00 am when you were trying to sleep off Friday's hangover, and 'Google', well, was it even a word? 'My Space' was something you shouted at your brat of a brother or sister every-time (s)he invaded your room and was pretty much up there with, 'my Space Invaders!' or ' my cassette player!'. (Yeah, remember those too?).  Web was something you got rid of with a long handled broom and seemed very much the domain of creaky old houses. Web design, well, let's just say you had to be a really clever little spider to make one of those.  No disrespect to the wonders of nature and spiders in general but I have yet to see a Lloyd Wright-style web or even a web with solar panels in a gated community.  But I digress.

Back at the old school house, 'Where's my cell?' meant you had lost a critical part of an experiment in biology, or depending on the kind of kid you were at school, meant you were on your way to jail and you wanted to know if you stood any chance of landing in a square room next to your twenty year old brother, or if things were really bad, your father.  Assuming you knew who he was, which back then, (oh, I am very, very old), you probably at least knew his name. 

Opening my school book, 'text' was something you read, not something you did.  Vernacular little quips like, 'I'll text you' would likely be met with blank stares followed by after school detention for attempting to rip a page from your French book or something. The only way to possibly text someone would have been to tear a page from the 'text book', turn it into a paper airplane and aim  it high at the recipient's head.  Now, THAT was texting.

Is Google a verb ?  'To Google....a person who utilizes a popular search engine for information.' (My definition), but here we go again: Search Engine?    Is Search Engine, the front of a train looking for something?  Or the inside of a car, attempting to do the same thing? I would search an on- line dictionary but the sounds of birds outside my window compel me to 'Tweet' my book.

And here's something else. On line? Was there ever an equivalent?  On line what? Shouldn't it be, 'on the line'?  As in  'She hangs the washing on the line?  Okay, that's sexist, what about him hanging washing on the line for a change?

I get an e-mail, (mail that comes in electronically and does not require a stamp) and I have to download the attachment, or I upload one myself and send it to someone else.  I take digital photos of my dogs and family (okay, perhaps family should come first but when you've got three dogs what can you do..they get in all the frames!), and then I blog.  

Blog?

Shouldn't that be bog?  My school was built on one...another story.

No, Blog.

And all of this needs no explaining to me...or for that matter to my retired mother, who is considering getting on the blog-bus.  Okay, I made that word up. 

There are times though, when i spin my mind back to ten years ago, fifteen, twenty,thirty...okay I'm stopping there. Where was all of this? Likely in a lab somewhere out in Silicon Valley or in the hands of an M.I.T grad'.   At the same time and in another room somewhere, a little hunched up person had just put down the paperback edition of Orwell's 1984 and decided that now would be a very good time to 'do a Newspeak Dictionary' and so the new language of today began.

It came slowly at first, with words like, 'Whatever"  spoken by sullen middle class teens in 'The Valley' who then went on to prep' the world for even more advanced expressions such as, 'whatev''. With mass minds in a tumble, we were now prepped for new-day expressions like, 'e-mail, World- Wide Web' and, wait for it,  'The Information Superhighway.'  AT&T promised that 'one day' we could send e-mails from 'the beach', and so we eagerly waited for the first Wireless network or NetBook, without having a clue as to what they were.

Today, I Podcast without confusion and without ever getting my hands on Orwell's dictionary, I am aware enough to know that an I-Phone does not mean  'I phone' nor is somebody's eye glued to the phone.  I download music as though I have been doing it since Noah parked his Arc and wonder how in the world I ever dealt with cassettes.  I even say, 'Whatever' in frustration when a favorite show I am trying to watch on my computer, crashes.  Yeah, 'crash' and we're not talking about your seventeen year old son's car.

I can  'Skype' my  mother and it doesn't feel like a derogatory term.   In fact she 'skyped' me first. 

So is there a new language evolving? I would say so. I am no linguist, however Newspeak aside, you only have to listen to yourself and watch your daily activities to know  there is. Something's going on. Let's be honest, when a face can become a book, well, I can only wonder at the things we might be saying ten years from now, and if I had a crystal ball (assuming that is still what I think it is), would I understand myself?

Newspeak anyone?