spelling – Ladies of Mystery

by Janis Patterson

Okay, I admit it. I spend much too much time wasting time on Facebook. It’s therapeutic. It fills my surface mind with trivialities so my deep mind can wrestle with the snarled complexities of my current WIP.

Or sometimes it’s just fun – sort of like a forbidden candy bar late in the afternoon even though you know it will spoil your dinner later.

And sometimes – distressingly often, in fact – it is infuriating. And depressing. And downright disgusting.

I’m not talking about some of the opinions held by the posters – though many of them do fit the above descriptions with a few even more damning pejoratives added, but that’s the subject of another angry column – but about the way they are expressed.

Over the years I’ve been swimming about in Facebook the use of language has not only deteriorated, but downright imploded. Rotted. Disintegrated.

And I don’t mean the fancy $3.00 words I personally prefer – I’m talking about the plain old four letter or less meat-and-potato words that are (or should be) the concrete basis of lingual communication. Staid old standbys like want and be and to and even and itself which magically morph into won’t and bee and two and end in such profusion that one does not have time to worry about comprehension but must instead go directly to translation. And at times even that doesn’t work, so the poor reader is left scratching his head in a total lack of comprehension at what the poster was trying to say. It even makes one wonder if the poster himself really knows what he was saying.

When did we become a country that so disregarded the basics of communication? Even our written language – an elegant simplicity of 26 discrete symbols which can be arranged at will to form an unending combination of words – is being seriously challenged by both a confusing and sometimes contradictory sub-language of initials-for-phrases, such as LOL, BFF, FAFO and the like. Which, one must admit, can provide handy circumlocutions for today’s ever-increasing vulgarity, but offer little in the way of nuance and precision.

Much more alarming is the regression of written language to an almost completely pictographic form of communication very similar to the antique Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs – the emoji. A seemingly endless variety of trite little sketches covering everything from facial expressions to individual depictions of food items, emojis have attracted a following who claim that using them is so much faster than having to sit down and type out a long list of alphanumeric symbols… a claim which I cry is thoroughly specious. By the time it takes to find the exact symbol you want, figure out how to transfer it to whatever it is you are writing (I did mention that I am a total techno-naif, didn’t I?), and keep your original line of thought going enough to go fishing for the next symbol I could have written at least a blog post on another, less-illustratable subject. Still…

I await with grim acceptance the arrival of a novel written entirely in emojis.

So – what are we going to do about our slipping grip on language? I accept, however reluctantly and largely silently, that most people are not linguists nor do they have the appreciation I do for my favorite long, complex and occasionally obfuscatory $3.00 and $5.00 words. I refuse to accept that our population has become so stupid that their ability to learn the proper use of the basic building blocks of communication, that their cognitive abilities are devolving to the sub-human range, so it must be some external influence. Perhaps it is the startling decline of expectations in our educational system. Perhaps it is a shift of societal admiration from those who strive and achieve to those who subsist and border on parasitical. Or something else that has not quite yet jelled in our collective consciousness. It is real, though, and our communication skills are suffering because of it.

However, I must admit that other than writing angry little screeds like this and yelling fruitlessly at the ignoramii who populate Facebook I have no idea of what to do other than to keep putting the best language I know out there and praying that somewhere it resonates with another linguist, then another and another and eventually we can reclaim and expand the pure and unsullied beauty of language.

P. S. If you like my blog posts, Volumes 1 – 4 of 50 Blogs on Writing and the Writing Life are now available for just $.99 each on Amazon.

by Janis Patterson

As a raging individualist I stand up for self-expression. That said, I also stand up for ‘normal’ punctuation and formatting. I do not see that as a behavioral oxymoron.

As writers we want our stories to be read, and in these days of literary bounty that’s getting harder and harder. It should be obvious that one way of achieving this end is to make the reading experience pleasant and easy, right? Well, there are those who apparently didn’t get the memo. Several times in the last few months I have read stories with ghastly formatting – I’m talking about deliberate formatting choices, not the weird kinks all electronic platforms toss at us occasionally. And I’m not going to mention the misspellings, the homophonic mayhem and just general wrong-ness, either. My blood pressure won’t take it.

Why on earth do people make deliberate formatting choices that make their books difficult to read? My guess is that it’s the same reason teens (as well as some older people) dye their hair kelly green and burgundy and other unnatural colors. They want to stand out, to shout ‘I’m different.’ Unfortunately, all too often in books the message comes through loud and clear – and what could be a good story is lost in an impenetrable sea of ‘individuality.’

When I worked in a literary agent’s office several decades ago (back in the bad old days of trad/paper pubbing only) we got an over-the-transom submission of what – from the blurb – sounded like a decent story. Except – the manuscript was a mess. He used standard quote marks, but every first line of each paragraph was flush with the left margin, while the rest of the paragraph was indented half an inch. Reading that was work, but even though I stopped after about ten or twelve pages I could see that it could be a good story with a little work – and proper formatting.

Being of a helpful nature, I sent the manuscript back with a note, explaining what I thought the ms needed, including standard formatting. I got back an excoriating letter, calling me a frustrated writer (I had sold half a dozen books by then, though none through the agency where I worked), accusing me of being hidebound and unwilling to accept new things, even of trying to stifle his creative genius and hide it under a blanket of conformity.

He, he said, knew better than I because he was a teacher of language and literature. (At one of our local junior – excuse me, community – colleges, I learned.) He also said he would take his book to those with the intelligence to appreciate it.

I never heard of him again.

I still believe that non-standard punctuation, misspellings, and incorrect word choices can kill a story, no matter how good it is, especially in today’s book-glutted world. Reading should not be work.