Ever Changing Words

The other day I was having a conversation with my roommate: Him: How do you spell ‘definitely’? Me: I dunno, that’s a hard word. I usually just put ‘def.’ Him: Ya, me too. I’ve been randomly thinking about how technology is changing the way we write, spell and even talk. Now that people have to limit characters for their twitter updates, or are texting, chatting, messaging, facebooking, etc., Words are turning very shorthand. Even in longer mediums… I’m forever getting email blogs with random things abbreviated. I think I saw super-mag today, something that reminded me of the made up slang of the future from J.D. Robb’s ‘In Death’ book series. I may sound like I’m against this changing of the English language but I’m not. Once upon a time, words and their spellings were more fluid before someone decided to dictionary and codify everything. So many words and ways of saying things have been made up on the fly because of inventions, books, plays, movies, whatever. Language is not static, it’s a living, being thing, and I find it exciting to see how rapidly it changes, even within my own lifetime (and I’m not even old yet!). I feel like technology has accelerated the formation of our culture, for good or bad. Two generations from now, all words may end up being short and abbreviated, or acronyms. New word structures may be formed from combinations of other abbreviated words. If you read something like Chaucer, in old English, it might be very difficult to read what it says, but that same thing may happen in even less time than has spanned from then. The way I see it is, as long as people can understand what you’re saying, who cares if it’s spelled correctly, punctuated exactly, or spelled out the whole way? Words are just a means to an end, the end being expression. If we’re too much a stickler for a rigid way of writing or talking, we risk losing that. What do you think?