Can U Keep Up W/the Changing Tech Vocabulary?

It's not just jargon. The electronic age is altering human communication.

by Mary McNamara

    It was an office romance that led, as so many do, to a domestic situation. Now the relationship between Americans and their computers is more than a decade old. And the day-to-day intimacy between human and machine has produced a whole new way of speaking.
     Unthinkingly, we use terms that many have forgotten were once technical. We don't converse, we interface. We don't feel an emotion, we process it. We don't juggle errands, we multitask. Instead of remembering, we download. Instead of criticizing, we flame. A mouse is no longer a small, twitchy animal, an icon not only a cultural symbol.
     And these are the old, boring terms. The list of technospeak is ever-changing and Homeric. A whole subgenre of dictionaries, including the inevitable one "For Dummies" has emerged in the last few years.
     But the effect the electronic revolution has had on human communication goes further than the jargon that accompanies almost any new technology. That's because the computer, unlike, say, the assembly line or the automobile, is about communication, about different methods of communication. And the hours that many of us spend e-mailing colleagues or lolling about in chat rooms is affecting more than our vocabulary--it's changing the way we talk, write and perhaps even think.
     "You always find people picking up terms from new industries," says Deborah Tannen, author of "The Argument Culture: Stopping America's War of Words" (Ballantine, 1999). "Like 'I'm not going to go there.' I wouldn't be surprised if that came from the Internet, the 'go to' idea. And e-mail is the ultimate expression of our tendency toward casual speech."
     Casual speech, she says, is what leads us to jettison traditional conversational formalities, causing some to even dispense with the personal pronoun. Hence those voicemails that go something like this: "Hi, this is Bob. Wanted to check in. Just briefly. Wondering how that Andrews account was coming along."
     Casual speech also paved the way for the modern e-mail in which the "To:" and "Re:" slots have replaced the standard letter form, including title and salutation. Accepted closings have long since shifted from "Sincerely Yours" or "Very Truly Yours" to "Best," "Cheers" or simply "Thanks." On e-mails, where the sender is identified at the top of the screen, they are often left off entirely.
     But the biggest change Tannen says she sees is the one created by the physical and emotional distance of electronic communication.
     "Anonymity, or at least lack of physical proximity, allows you to say things you might not otherwise," she says, adding that e-mail also lends itself to misunderstanding more than a phone conversation, or even a voicemail message, might. "Any time you're dealing with a one-way communication, you can't control how it's being interpreted. There is no tone of voice, no context."
     That fear of being misunderstood has led to a legion of acronyms, some of which existed before (BFD, FUBAR), others new to the medium: LOL (laughing out loud), EOL (end of lecture), IMHO (in my humble opinion). Even more popular are the emoticons (a word itself that did not previously exist)--the inevitable smiley or frowny face inserted in a message to soften a stinging retort or to turn an insult into a good-natured jibe.
     Reliance on an electronic wink or kiss or sniffle not only allows writers to express sentiments they might not reveal in person or over the phone but also to use imprecise language. As one father of two put it, you can't exactly stick a smiley face into a college application essay, or, for that matter, a thank you letter.
     "Everybody knows about the little smiley face," says Pamela Munro, a linguistics professor at UCLA. "To me, the biggest change has been the frequency and length of communications, but that is more of a behavioral thing. Although [e-mail] has made people seemingly incapable of using capital letters. And it hasn't improved spelling."
     Enuf. Shuld. Mebbe. Cuz. Ur. Til. These are just a few of the intentional e-mail misspellings; the unintentional mistakes, some the product of speedy typing, some of ignorance, have some concerned that the language itself is suffering.
     Marie Agel, a French instructor at Moorpark College, says the changes the Internet has wreaked upon the English language are very clear when she compares the skills of her young-adult daughter and son.
     "They are three years and nine months apart," Agel says. "My daughter went to the library to research her papers; my son, who is just 20 now, goes online. Her spelling and grammar are so much better than his. Children don't have to learn how to spell; they just have the computer do it."
     Agel, who recently remarked to a class that working on a computer was ruining her handwriting, believes e-mail has a language all its own.
     "Very short sentences, very precise. All about the information, nothing extra," she says, adding that in her previous job as a human resources manager, colleagues sitting not three feet away from each other communicated through e-mail. "Yes, it saves time," she says. "But you lose the human touch. And you also lose the possibility of the conversation going in a different direction."
     As a creative writing instructor at UC Riverside, novelist Susan Straight sees the effect of the Internet on both the content and style of her students' work.
     "They love to write about e-mail, to write it as dialogue," she says. "The story right in front of me is about a guy in a chat room. And they like to write the acronyms and symbols, which they have to explain to me because I am clueless. But I do see them writing in shorter, simpler sentences. The dialogue especially. Monosyllabic."
     Alan Warhaftig, a teacher at the Fairfax Magnet Center for Visual Arts, isn't sure if the short-and-sweet trend he sees is a function of e-mail or of being a teenager in America today.
     "It's always been very difficult to get them to write more than short sentences," he says. "What you've got increasingly is an oral culture. Kids don't read all that much, they watch things on screens and they speak in fragments. There are run-ons and fragments all over their papers, but it's not because of e-mail. It's because disciplined writing is out of style."
     On the other hand, Warhaftig says, he writes more e-mails than he ever did letters. And he is very aware of the style and content because he knows "these things can take on a life of their own. They last forever."
     But, he says, without the confines of an actual page, or a room with others in it, people can lose track of their words, can run on and on, or write things they would never say.
     Which is not always a bad thing. Many relationships have been mended by e-mail, romances rekindled, partnerships cemented. It is the perfect venue for stream of consciousness, a sendable diary.
     But stream of consciousness is not, in most circles, an acceptable conversation style. Nor is the blurting of information without prefacing remarks or nuance. Grammar, punctuation and spelling were standardized not just to give parents something to correct but to make communication easier. Some poets have experimented with the forms, developing literary tics such as a fondness for dashes or the capitalization of nonproper nouns for emphasis.
     But e.e. cummings, remember, had the good grace to write poems, and relatively short ones at that, rather than novels or essays. There is something to be said for taking pity on the reader.
     Even in a chat room.