Editorial

Communication is innate. From our humble beginnings of crying, babbling, and using our tiny hands and feet to the letters we ignore in the mail, the small-talk we make while in line at Target, and the nods and signals we give other drivers at a stop sign, humans are always communicating. We communicate to share inform others, to persuade, to convey emotion, to understand. We use our gestures, facial expression, vocal expression, and technology to do so. But most importantly, we use our words.

However, these vital pieces of communication are losing their value. It’s true this is not a new phenomenon; language has always been growing and adapting with the changing world. Even Shakespeare molded the language of time to suit his needs, coining words like assassin and bump. He revolutionized the language of his time, and compared to the way we speak now, it’s quite apparent that English, sans the ‘thou’s and ‘methinks’ of the 1700’s, has been changing. Look at James Joyce’s Ulysses, which begins in Olde English and evolves in its linguistics chronologically as the book progresses on to show the progression of language through the ages.

Yes, our language is malleable. It bends to suit the times. But in the rapid-fire nature of our society, now rampant with instant communication, can often strip language its basics. Sure, language is essential in sharing the necessities of information, the who’s, what’s, and where’s. At its barest, words are tools to say what needs to be said. But as we limit our text messages to quick snippets of words and begin to think in ‘LOL’s, we forget that language has a much deeper value.

We’ve evolved from the sonnets of Shakespeare for a reason. While we used to script poetry in iambic pentameter, poetry has broken formulaic standards of the past and opened new doors. It’s not a bad thing. In this case, language has still been fine tuned and crafted to an art. English often gets a bad rap for being an ‘ugly’ language, without the flourish and ‘issimo’s of romantic European tongues. But English is beautiful when seen as an art, with the potential to be spun into brilliant stories and descriptions.

The problem at hand lies in the fact that now we boil what could be art to nothing more than raw material. English is being broken by the fast paced nature of society. We abbreviate everything, add ‘like’ between words to fill in our silence, and rely on easy crutches for descriptions: cool, lame, sucked, etc.

When we abuse English by treating it as nothing more than a vehicle for basic communication, we lose the richness and value of how much language can actually convey. Falling into sound byte traps of society is an insult to the true nature of language. Yes, it’s a means of communication. But it’s more than that. We don’t have to simply ‘LOL’; we can share our emotions with phrases like ‘the immense pleasure I feel is immeasurable, and I can’t help but nearly combust from this laughter’.

We hold in our minds the potential for true art. Not all of us are poets, but we can all appreciate the effect language has on our world if we value how rich our communication through words can truly be.