Save This Word!

Have you “LOL”d this week? Did something make you exclaim “OMG?” Chances are, if you are under a certain age, you are bilingual in English and text speak. But just in case you didn’t know, LOL is an abbreviation for laugh out loud and OMG stands for Oh My God. What began as a method to reduce the time it takes to send a text message on a phone without a QWERTY keyboard has become a new language. My teenage son sends me texts that I have to consult another teenager to decode. While I think using these abbreviations can be clever and fun, I worry that our young people are losing the ability to communicate in rich and meaningful ways.

Last week, I read that the Concise Oxford English Dictionary is cutting 200 words from the new edition. The words that will be replacing them include “tweet,” “chillax,” “staycation,” and “flash mob.” Who decided that there are 200 words that we just don’t need anymore? As a lover of words, my first instinct is a desire to save those orphans, give them a home, and promise to love them forever. Yet, I am not a Luddite: I use computers every day, update my Facebook status frequently, and, yes, I do text. Still, I try to use capitalization, punctuation, and words that mean something. I don’t want to report I am sad when, in fact, I am gloomy, melancholic, or dour.

There are words that I love: buttery words like “supple” and stingy words like “crag.” There are words that I loathe: “underscore” and “pithy” which sound like the opposite of their definitions. But whether I like a word or not, I don’t want us casting them off like rubbish. “What’s the big deal?” you might ask. Remember reading the novel “1984” in high school, the one with Big Brother? In that dystopian world , lexicographers worked to reduce the number of words used in society. They called the emerging language “Newspeak” and the ultimate goal was to replace Standard English so that every single desire or thought could be conveyed with a single word. The major theme of 1984 is censorship by the government. It seems that we don’t even need an oppressive government to censor us. We are quite content to censor ourselves.

Another problem is that text speak has trickled out beyond instant messages and texts. My teacher friends tell me that their students are using it in assignments and papers. I’ve even had a professor tell me that her college students use these abbreviations in their email correspondence to her. I just know that it’s on a resume somewhere! Recent research has even found that those young adults who used more language-based shortcuts produced worse formal writing than those who used them more sparingly.

The social impact of text messaging is staggering. Two and a half billion text messages are sent every day in the United States. Not only are real words being lost to abbreviations, real exchanges of ideas are being lost too. I remember when I used to get handwritten letters. Then I got form letters at Christmas-time. Then came emails. And then came the email forwards. Now I just get status updates and tweets. No one gets real letters anymore unless you have a relative in prison. What will libraries archive one hundred years from today? How will we see the development of great ideas?

I believe in the strange magic of language. I believe that the words we choose mark down in history what we hold dear and what we disdain. I believe that if today we minimize the way we communicate, tomorrow we will minimize the way we think. I encourage you to adopt an endangered word. Challenge yourself to increase your vocabulary. Write a real letter or keep a journal. Preserve our culture; cherish our language. And do me a favor: spread the word.