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Standards and Anti-Standards
lol i dont know why sooooo many millennials hate grammar but whatchya gonna do about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Joking aside, this phenomenon drives me mad. Scarcely a day passes when I don’t see some flagrantly ungrammatical Facebook posting by someone who should know better. Twenty-something scientists, mathematicians, historians, poets, journalists, and even editors — editors, for goodness’ sake! — all write in the same quasi-illiterate nonstyle. When the social-media output of America’s aspiring literati is indistinguishable from that of its middle-school dropouts, something is deeply, deeply wrong. Our language’s Millennial gatekeepers haven’t merely abandoned their posts; they’ve joined the barbarians in storming the castle.
Now, I’m a pedant. My standards are unrealistic. I understand that. I certainly don’t expect people — even well-educated people — to plop HTML style tags into their text messages in lieu of italics.* I don’t expect them to distinguish between em dashes and en dashes. I don’t demand perfection. Typos happen. But is it so difficult to separate different sentences with periods? Does it truly take undue effort to capitalize an “I” or spell “don’t” with an apostrophe? I think not.
So, what’s happening here? It’s not poor education. These same people who present themselves on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as dyslexic fifth-graders are perfectly capable of writing polished prose. Indeed, I’d bet that a great many of them could pulverize me in a writing contest. They know the rules, and they fail to apply them. They choose to be ineloquent. Why? Because it’s a form of social signaling. Because sending into the digital nether a garbled mishmosh of words and abbreviations, all garnished with a heaping helping of emojis, says, “I’m young and sociable and cool, just like you.” Because ignoring standards has, paradoxically, become a standard. Because the absence of rules is itself a rule.
My friend and I once became embroiled in a heated (read: nearly violent), multi-day argument about punctuation in text messages. His position? That ending a message with a period constitutes a breach of the social contract. That terminating a text is an immoral act. This friend is quite bright — brilliant, even. He’s an economist and a classicist. He can read Latin. He’s an able writer. But he, like a great many Millennials, seems to believe that terminal punctuation is something to be reserved for only the tensest of interactions. Writing like a second-week ESL student, by contrast, signals openness, friendless, and a willingness to engage with interlocutors. Failing to understand this might have professional consequences, he warned. It might give someone a reason to fire me.
Pfft. I’m willing to take the risk. If grammar counts as a fireable offense in my boss’s eyes, I ought to run, screaming, from that boss, anyway. If grammar makes me look like an out-of-touch curmudgeon, good. It’s my pleasure. Better to be a curmudgeon than a mushy-minded social milquetoast.
I ought to remind my friend, though, that anti-standards have consequences. Just as an anti-joke is nothing more than a joke that subverts the expectations surrounding jokes, anti-standards, in general, are nothing more than standards which fling aside all the rules that proceeded them. Artistic anti-standards brought us postmodern art. Architectural anti-standards brought us brutalism and Cabrini–Green. Anti-standards tend to encourage a race to the bottom. In the realm of language, it’s an egalitarian race. Everyone — learned and ignorant, smart and dumb — competes to look as inane as possible. The pathology spreads — first from informal settings (like text-message chains) to semi-informal settings (like a Facebook page), and then to public platforms (like Twitter, Instagram, and personal blogs). Writing grammatically becomes ever slightly more unnatural, and ever slightly more a technical specialty.
What is the consequence of all this twaddle? I don’t know. All I can say is this:
The Millennials can pry the punctuation from my cold, dead hands.
* Yes, I used to do this — until I grew tired of fighting my phone’s automatic spelling correction. Now, I settle for asterisks.
Published in Culture
Your brilliant friend is, at the same time, an idiot.
But what if their use of social media indicates they don’t understand how to think, not in even the most rudimentary ways?
I remember trying to engage a millennial in debate, the summer of 2016, and although it seemed to be they didn’t agree with me, neither could they debate me. My remark left them helpless. It was like they were looking around, hoping to find the appropriate emoji floating about in the air above our heads.
It doesn’t really matter. The deconstructionists are going to interpret it however they want anyway.
I’m even worse than that. It’s just “he.”
I don’t agree with much that the foul-mouthed buffoon wrote. His use of crude language completely undermined his credibility.
The piece follows the usual formula. It’s snark wrapped in irony inside flippancy.
Thank you.
Full stop.
Most of my texts are single sentences, so I don’t put a period at the end. That would be weird! The end of the text is enough of a stop. But if I’m going to include a second sentence, then I do use a period at the end of the first one.
Toddler-ish?
Haha.
You are going to make me click that link. To understand uptalk. Gahhh.
That sounds to me very much like someone saying “I chew with my mouth open when I dine alone.”
I’m reminded of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s plaint about this lamentable situation. It’s a parody of the then-current song, “Blurred Lines”, that he titled: “Word Crimes”. (I’ll link to the video when I’m at my PC….Update: Linked.)
Toddlers may have idiosyncratic grammatical rules and/or vocabulary choices. However, at least they apply them consistently; this activity flies in the face of Mr. Riley’s description of wanton disregard, above. :-)
Hey! (Don’t forget parentheses.)
kick-back and smell the coffee – or not
apparently I have a less than refined sense of humor. 1000 pardons
Our local newspaper is a haven for “journalists” and “editors” who cannot spell, use proper grammar, or use the correct word in context. Even AP stories used by the paper contain errors, and their frequency is increasing. They will even truncate sentences in the middle if they run out of space, instead of taking the time to rewrite an article to fit.
The spoken language evolves, but leftists force definitional changes to the meaning of words on the fly if it will advance their agenda.
That gets me boiling every time. I’ll yell at the TV/radio: “That really affected I?”
Nothing is more annoying than people who take grammar scolding to an extreme. It’s fine to complain about Facebook nonsense, but don’t complain about grammar conventions in a professional setting.
I was always obsessive about grammar and punctuation growing up. So was everyone else I knew. This attitude of sloppy grammar isn’t universal among Millenials.
I do try to follow the period-as-emojii texting rules though.
Jose, you’re stolen my thunder. Give it back. Susan expects me to make that comment about parentheses, and you’ve now spoiled my fun.
Kent
I do. It lives via the amendment process as laid out in the constitution.
CR, are you inferring that this is the first generation to fail to man the barricades against degeneration of the language? This is a genuine problem, but not a new one. The ambiguity in my first sentence is the result of prior failure in this regard.
We can hope that the youngsters will grow out of it. I mean, like, I don’t think that we’re going to communicate this way, like, forever, do you? Like, totally not.
this has been fun now im going to go gag myself with a spoon
My position is not quite that language changes and therefore we must support those changes.
My position is closer to:
a) Strictly enforcing grammar rules that have little-to-no basis in historical usage is modernist nonsense. e.g. Lots of writers hailed in the canon of English literature (such as Dickens or Austen or Shakespeare or Twain, etc. etc. etc.) used things like the singular “they”, split infinitives, prepositions at the ends of sentences, the word “ain’t”, etc.
b) If you’re not the intended audience for a piece of writing, you don’t have a lot of standing to complain about the quality of that writing. Some, maybe, but not a lot.
Not at all. But this is the first generation to justify its barricade-abandoning with linguistic arguments. It’s also (arguably) the first generation to develop and use contradictory forms of written communication in an earnest way.
Moreover, I think it’s important that people whose job is to enforce “traditional” norms of grammar, punctuation, and spelling should model that behavior themselves.
Fair enough, in the case of text messages. The intended audience for a tweet, Facebook post, or Instagram photo, though, is . . . well, anyone who happens to see it. So, I do have standing to complain.
Misthiocracy, you’re discovered an end run around the Ricochet censors. Clever chap.
That’s simply not accurate.
Well, yes, some people hide some content behind filters, but a great many posts, tweets, and photos — perhaps most (though, obviously, I can’t prove this) — are floating around freely, accessible to all who bother to look (or, in the case of Facebook, bother to create an account).
Anyone who doesn’t think his public tweet won’t be seen by people he doesn’t know is kidding himself.
As an old English professor and the author of a grammar book (A Writer’s Guide), I’ve read this thread with a great deal of interest.
Obviously, language is going through a period of rapid change, in large part due to texting, blogs, tweets, and so on. Like you, I find myself resistant to some of those changes. I want to hang on to, for instance, the distinction between “disinterested” and “uninterested.” And I still like to see a pronoun agree in number with its noun or pronoun antecedent.
But those are the lost causes of a grammar curmudgeon. They’re not worth going to battle over.
Like you, I would never correct a Ricochet writer. I’m tempted of course. With my background, how could I not be tempted? I spent my working life correcting writing problems. But if I correct you, you might be so annoyed that you would start to correct me. And that would be annoying.
Correcting someone’s spelling or grammar strikes me as being petty. Actually, it rarely happens on Ricochet. I like that.