Let`s Talk - Sites@Duke

Let’s Talk—or Text or Tweet or GChat or Something
By Indu Ramesh
I remember when I was first snatched up because I used language in a
different way.
I was six. I sat innocently in the first grade classroom, taking a “Mad Math
Minute” test. Mad Math Minute tests were my obsession at the time, a way to
fulfill the “mathematics” section of our Montessori school lesson plan in less than
60 seconds. To boot, the task earned you a gold star sticker if you finished in less
than 30 seconds.
The ultimate in first grade glory
When my teacher descended upon me 29 seconds later, I felt as if I’d won
a Nobel Prize, or the school Kickball Championship. A gold star was on the way!
Everything was coming full circle; I’d fulfilled my life’s purpose in a short six
years. Starting with the gold star, I would proceed to take over the world and
turn everything into sparkly and unicorn-filled happiness. With these most
pleasant of thoughts racing through my mind, I braced for the gold star.
1 It didn’t come. “Indu,” my teacher said. “You are leaving school right
now. You going to speech therapy, because you haven’t been able to say your R’s
properly.”
“Speech thewwapy?”, I asked. “You can still undewwstand me, wight?
Wheww’s my gold staww? Why aww you kidnapping me? ”
I sounded like my favorite cartoon!
Well, I eventually got my gold star, but my sense of achievement seemed
trivial in the light of two years of tedious speech therapy. I spent each hour-long
session looking at pictures of raccoons and roller coasters until I finally stopped
saying “wacoon” and “wollew coasteww”, egged on more by sheer annoyance
rather than a sincere desire to reform my speech.
Still, I found the ordeal to be rather silly. People could understand what I
was saying, even if my language and pronunciation were different. If you wrote
down what I said phonetically, it would still be relatively comprehensible. Let’s
put it this way: My speech wasn’t 100%, but my communication was.
Years later, I realized that the speech therapy was necessary, but purely
for social reason, to communicate correctly in today’s world. Now, I’m glad I
2 endured the experience and don’t have a speech impediment—but boy, was it
the bane of my first grade existence!
✰✰
It’s so weird to think that years ago, people used to communicate via
messages.
I mean real, physical messages. People had to travel on foot or ride on
horseback, dodging stupendous obstacles— river rapids, showers of sharp
arrows, rings of fires, avalanches—in order to deliver important news, letters—a
simple scroll of the written word. Oh, and sometimes the king killed them
because he didn’t like their message. Oh, and messages took weeks to months to
deliver. For the average messenger, life was pretty rough.
Now, aided by the Internet, an email or instant message is just that—sent
instantly. When a significant event occurs—Osama Bin Laden’s death comes to
mind—Twitter becomes abuzz instantly. In the case of that event, a man located
in Abbottabad, Pakistan at the time unintentionally live-blogged the entire
ordeal. Indeed, frustrated at the floods of questions from journalists, he finally
tweeted the following:
ReallyVirtual Abbottabad Lahore Pakistan
Bin Laden is dead. I didn’t kill him. Please let me sleep now
Journalists. So annoying.
3 Despite his appeal, @ReallyVirtual didn’t get any sleep that night. It might
have been for the best. His twitter is still up as a valuable source of detailed live
commentary of the raid in Abbottabad—that proves fascinating even months
later. You could look at newspaper articles to learn the story, but
@ReallyVirtual’s real-time updates allowed you to almost experience the event
with him.
In that sense, as communication becomes more immediate, it’s almost
become more intimate. Pretty cool, right?
✰✰
In physics, one has to do a lot more work (there’s a physics pun in here
somewhere) to find an instantaneous velocity rather than a general one.
Similarly, as communication becomes more instantaneous, we have to do more
work to keep it simple and effective.
So, in a sense, we try to make it so that we do less work. You becomes “u”;
are becomes “r”; abbreviated expressions like “OMG”, “LOL”, “WTF”, BRB”,
and “ILY” become a routine part of conversation.
Indeed, there are so many abbreviations now that most are impossible to
decipher. In sixth grade, my best friend wrote in her profile that I was her
“BFWWPWUALHF!!!!!”. When I asked her what this was, she replied, “I’m your
Best friend we will play with unicorns and live happily forever, of course!” Oh!
Naturally.
4 It was an obsession.
We haven’t talked since middle school. We never played with unicorns.
Still, it’s my favorite abbreviation to date.
✰✰
It’s strange, the way that impersonal, technology-aided conversation has
taught us to warp and abstract language. Faced with a desire to communicate as
quickly and efficiently as possible, while still managing to make our speech
undoubtedly our own, we’ve done the impossible. We’ve each created our own,
personal vernacular.
This phenomenon has been going on for quite a while. For example, the
first recorded use of the acronym “OMG” was as early as 1917. British Navy
Admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher wrote the following in a letter to no less than
Winston Churchill: "I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis -O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) -- Shower it on the Admiralty!” Little did he know that
eighty years later, his little abbreviation would become the rage of teenage
America.
5 Or, let’s take the case of Twitter. In a 150-character Tweet, a person must
express the essence of his or her being—what they feel, experience, and live,
right at a particular moment. They must convey their personality in this short
space, and also attempt connect their message to everyone else in the
Twitterverse. After all, Twitter functions as a space for discussion and
collectivization of real-time events—but also language.
So people do what they can. In 150 characters, each person tries to create a
message uniquely his or her own, yet also able to be discussed in a social context.
Abbreviations are the rule of the day—not simply limited to “OMG” and “LOL”
any more, every word that can be shortened becomes a new word. Fabulous
becomes “fab,” people become “peeps,” thanks becomes “thx.” Metacommentary that groups Tweets into global, connection-fostering forms of
discussion can be added to the end of a Tweet, in the form of a hashtag or
pound-sign: everything from #sports to #EgyptRevolution to
#firstworldproblems to #allyourbasearebelongtous.
Hashtags can define and consolidate us at the same time, so watch how often you use the hashtag
#drunktweeting!
Twitter is a place where the move towards a different vernacular becomes
collectivized. Each time we warp language, we do it to a global audience of
6 millions of instant bloggers, setting an example for the world to follow and reTweet. Through using Twitter, we perhaps shift our vernacular to a place where
we are free—or even expected—to make our language our own.
✰✰
Somehow, between my First Grade years and now, we’ve moved to a
world where playing with language is much more acceptable. Needless to say,
the increased accessibility and use of technology has been a huge catalyst in this
phenomenon. That being said, in my experience, I’ve found that however much
language is warped—whether on purpose (twitter hashtags) or not (speech
impediments)—meaning can nearly always be retained.
And it’s comforting to know that most of the time, what I say or write or
type will make sense!
✰✰
Last Friday night, as the song by Katy Perry hints, I went out and had a
rollicking good time, perhaps aided, somewhat, by this familiar compound:
7 A friend
Indeed, by midnight, my cerebellum had definitely been compromised.
My movements were sloppy, my speech was unrestrained, and some of my sense
of dignity had been lost to the night.
Somewhere along the way, I sent these texts to my friend, typed into my
iPhone 3GS. I remember neither why I had the urge to send the texts nor what I
was trying to say, but my text messages ran something like this:
I will hazard a guess that the second text meant something along the lines of “I love you.” True
friendship!
Let me put it simply: I was a mess. Lacking coordination, I could not
properly type what I meant into my iPhone virtual keyboard. Lacking dignity, I
was too lazy to fix the mass of letters that popped on the screen, too much for
even my iPhone’s AutoCorrect to handle. And so the texts—none of which
contained a single legible word—sent on, to my friend.
8 She replied promptly, with not even a trace of irony:
A revelation of astonishing accuracy
And so somehow, with language muddled and warped, without typing a
single English word into my iPhone 3GS, I was able to communicate meaning—
which my friend grasped instantly and accurately.
✰✰
Of course, I didn’t intend for my message to come out as a sloppy mess of
letters. It just happened, and my friend, in her own way, understood. Still, even
when I possess complete mental facilities, it’s not like I text—or communicate via
Twitter, Email, or Facebook—in perfect English. If I wanted to soberly
communicate my friend that I loved her, I’d probably abstract the language into
something like this:
9 True friendship, again
You know, this actually isn’t too different from my cerebellumcompromised second text. It’s pretty warped, but one still gains the impression
of love. My friend, once again, perfectly grasped the meaning, and responded.
✰✰
It’s worth mentioning that playing with language can actually be quite
fun. Wordplay is, at its helm, play—and abstracting language for aesthetic or
practical purpose can be quite enjoyable.
While many trending Twitter topics deal with important things like
current news headlines or Nicki Minaj’s nip-slip or Rafael Nadal, a surprising
amount deal with no more than linguistic play for the sake of sheer silliness. For
example, a hashtag that was en vogue recently was to
10 #replacebooktitleswithbacon. You read that right, folks. Some particularly
amusing examples follow:
AngelesAgenda Rome
#HarryPotter and the Deathly Bacon. I would read
that. #replacebooktitleswithbacon #harrypotterandthedeathlyhallo
ws
MaryBethSXDX MB Kennedy
The Bacon in the Rye #replacebooktitleswithbacon
23 Sep
thoughtaccident Pat Watson
The girl who played with bacon #replacebooktitleswithbacon
I don’t think it would have worked with any other meat. I mean, #replacebooktitleswithsteak? That’s
just dumb.
Language is so many things at once—innovative, creative, academic,
intellectual, communicative, restrictive, comprehensible, incomprehensible—but
it’s important to remember that it can also be fun, and even silly. Wordplay is not
only enjoyable, but also easy to do. Perhaps the reason we shift our vernacular is
that it’s like a game—light, entertaining, and, well, a #winning endeavor.
✰✰
All these things I’ve talked about—this wordplay, this warping of
language—I’ll always find it interesting that these things are possible in written
or computer-exchanged communication, but not speech. Half the changes we
11 make to language on Twitter, or in emails, or texts or instant messages—are
never incorporated into spoken language. In today’s society, people with speech
impediments or different accents are at best tolerated, and at worst belittled.
Remember my six-year-old speech impediment? Had I retained that in
oral communication, life would not be as pleasant for me. Yet every time I
mispronounced my R’s in speech, meaning was retained. And so while
collectivization enhances wordplay, it also limits the capabilities of language—
constrains it into something that must be globally accepted.
Perhaps the language shift still has a ways to go. Still, it’s always strange
that playing around with one’s vernacular is so much more acceptable (and
accepted) in mediated, online spaces than in, well, direct oral communication.
✰✰
I usually have at least five Gmail Chat windows open on my computer at
once. All of them are people who I talk to frequently in real life.
It’s different, though. I can’t quite get my hands on why.
12 Acknowledgments:
It may go without saying—but I’d like to thank my first grade teacher Janis for forcing me
into speech therapy, my sixth grade friend Melissa for her always-insightful acronyms (I
really should get back in touch with her), and friend Jie Wang for never failing to provide
an adequate response to my drunk texts. This piece could not have been written without
them. On a more serious note, I would like to thank the members of my writing group,
Arjun, Aaron, and Dan, for their perceptive ideas and comments in making this piece more
focused on relevant topics and themes. Finally, I would like to thank Professor Harris for
his insightful feedback in providing an interesting frame while maintaining the loose
structure of this piece.
13