A Rose by any other name

So I just got back from the most entertaining conversation at dinner. Well, it was necessarily entertaining, but it really was thought-provoking and involved three members of our Seminar and one Philosophy major. It started when I referred to the person who will be living next door to me next semester as a "rando", short for "random person" since it was not by our design that he will be living there. This word was not my own invention, but it is one of my favorites and thus I use it as much as humanly possible. We then collectively realized that this is a trend in our contemporary culture - shortening words from their original forms, as in "poss" for "possibly"; "whatevs" for "whatever"; "sitch" for "situation"; "probs" for "probably"; and I have no idea how to even begin spelling the modification for "usual" but I'm pretty sure you know what it sounds like.

We Media Studies majors thought this was a pretty cool phenomenon (even though I admit to thinking "poss" was absolutely ridiculous the first time I heard it), but the Philoph major called it a "perversion" of the English language. He thought it was a sign that we were simplifying our thoughts and becoming more incapable of expressing ourselves as a culture. Proper English, to him, has some sort of inherent ability for communication and as such should be what we all strive to speak.

Our first contention was that words are merely signifiers of thoughts, feelings or things, and that if the word changes, then the thing it represents doesn't necessarily change along with it, and certainly isn't devalued in any way. He either couldn't seem to grasp this concept or just simply disagreed with it, and I think it flies directly in the face of his "Proper English" theory and as such, was not directly rebutted.

The other thing we brought up was that slang and other methods of linguistic modification are examples of marginalized people exercising agency in the construction of their own cultural acceptance. Rather than allow themselves to be ostracized by the dominant culture, they create an atmosphere in which their form of language is the dominant or accepted one. Through this proactive manner, we collectively continue to adapt our language to best fit the needs of the population that speaks it.

However, the examples above that are specifically for shortening words from their original forms don't exactly stem from a "marginalized people". It was my contention, though, that they represent a generational gap between our generation and all older ones when it comes to familiarity with digital media. I know that earlier today I revised my sentiment to say that I didn't think the generation gap was as big as I had first imagined. Well, I'm un-vising that thought. Verbal word shortening arises from the digital word shortening in which we all engage when we're talking to people online, either through an instant messenger of some kind or in a chat room or forum. Our generation's comfort level with acronyms and substituted word forms is, I would postulate, unparalleled in history in that we can communicate entirely through non-words if we so choose. Granted this doesn't work for massive treatises such as this one, but in most everyday speech, it does work. Our way, then, of differentiating ourselves from those who we perceive as being less competent with our social realm, but still asserting themselves as dominant in it, is to create a language unto our own through which they will not be able to communicate. It is natural that this would appear in our daily speech, as well, since it is so pervasive in the world in which we spend a large portion of our time.

I don't know if you all buy this, but I hope that at least someone made it to the bottom of this blog entry and has some sort of thought on the whole phenomenon. My friend thought it was something that we as a generation would grow out of, and we probably will, but I don't think that detracts from its import as a cultural tool. Thoughts?