Contemporary Media and Internet Jargon: Accelerated Convulsion of the Word, Vocabulary and Language

According to the Random House Dictionary's senior editor, Struart B. Flexner: "The words, we use are changing faster today - not merely on the slang level, but on every level. The rapidity with which words come and go is vastly accelerated. This seems to be true not only of English, but French, Russian and Japanese as well-off the estimated 450,000 "usable" words in the English Language today, only perhaps 250,000 would be comprehensible to William Shakespeare. Were Shakespeare suddenly to materialize in London or New York today, he would be able to understand, on average, only five out of every nine words in our vocabulary. The Bard would be semi-literate."

Grammatical Man

The modern revolution of in linguistics, which began in the 1950s, discovered at the same time that the genetic code, was an attempt to investigate the universal principles of all languages using a similar route, delving down beneath the observable surface of spoken sentences to the hidden abstract structures underlying the. Noam Chomsky sought for tacit principles in the hidden mental operations which undergird human language. Chomsky wanted to discover "those basic relationships which hold in general." According to him, "What person says is an unreliable guide to what that person actually knows, often unconsciously, and it is knowledge of the patterns of language in the full sense of the word. For a theory of language in the full sense of the word can be said is of more interest than what is actually said, and every speaker can say infinitely much. The point of view of its relationship with all other messages which could have been sent but were not. The input to the channel between speaker and listener is "coded" by grammar which is regular and reliable. But as a message moves from the source in the brain on its journey to the person for whom it is intended, the message becomes distorted in various ways. At the surface, in the form of speech, the message is very often untidy, imperfect, and full of errors. It conveys messages, to be sure, but the messages are distorted by "noise" in the form of mistakes, slips of the tongue, memory lapses, repetitions and distractions. The receiver must make sense of the message, disentangle it from the noise, reconstruct it in its original, non-random form. Unless this is done, communication is impossible." Chomsky believes that a linguistic theory should deal only with an "ideal" speaker and listener, who knows his language perfectly and never makes any mistakes,never departs from grammatical propriety. This mode of communication is quickly being challenged by the new and emerging media and merging relationships.

If our images of reality are changing more rapidly, and the gadgets of image-transmission are being speeded up, and a parallel change is altering the very codes we use. For language, too, is convulsing. If language during Shakespeare had at least 200,000, these have dropped out and replaced in the four centuries then. The turnover in the language has more or less occurred in the last fifty years alone. The dropping and adding of words in the language is being replaced three times faster. Alvin Toffler gives us these examples: Some new words come directly from the world of consumer products and technology. Thus, for example, words like "fast-back," "wash-and-wear" or "flashcube" were all propelled into language by advertising in recent years. Other words come from the headlines. "Sit-in" and "swim-in" are recent products of the civil rights movement; "teach -in" a product of the campaign against the Vietnam war; "be-in" and "love-in" products of the hippie subculture. The LSD cults have brought with it a profusion of new head- "acidhead," "psychedelic," etc.

Flexner further explains how the language has changed from the 50s and 60s, affecting our speech and vocabulary patterns. He says: "At the level of slang the turnover is is so quick that the dictionary makers changed their criteria for word inclusion. In 1954, when I started work on the Dictionary of American Slang, I would not consider a word for the inclusion unless I could find three uses of the word over a five year period. Today such a criterion would be impossible, because, language, like art, in increasingly becoming a fad proposition. The slang "fab" and "gear" for example, didn't last a single year. They entered the teen-age vocabulary in about 1966; by 1967 they were out. You cannot use a time criterion for slang anymore. Toffler states: "As new words sweep in, old words vanish. A picture of a nude girl nowadays is no longer "pin-up" or a "cheesecake shot" but a "playmate." "hep" has given way for "hip"; Hipster to "Hippie." Many words, in short, have come and gone with the same speed they came in with. New words ket on coming on throughout the sixties and seventies, and have also been replaced by newer one in the 80s, 90s and 00s. As the language turned, it even appeared in non verbal forms of communication. The circle formed by the thumb and forefinger suggests that all goes well is now fading out. "V for Victory signs was now being used by protesters. Gestural language is peaking and affecting our language patterns and evolution.

It is important that we begin to look and understand how contemporary language or mode of speech is used to hide, even to ourselves, the less than exciting lives most of us are leading. Arthur Berger asks: "Have you ever wondered just how big Giant King Size" actually is or what "terrific" really means"? Berger says that we use language to hide, and whatever it is we are hiding, we are hiding it from ourselves too. He futher makes this point concrete by stating: "I can recall once overhearing two bored youths aat a tennis court. Said one of them. "let's split," a phrase in part usage today, in fitting with the schizophrenic nature of the times. Somehow, "splitting" from place is much more exciting that "going some-place else" or "leaving".

The Language of Radio and Television

Television commercials have bred some form os skepticism that needs to be overcome. They make absurd claims on Menus, travel brochures, book jackets and so on. The law of diminishing returns woks since the people believe less and less, and the advertisers promise more and more, that in the end advertising has created skepticism. Leo Lowenthal discusses the use of "superlatives" in the following manner: "This wholesale distribution of highest ratings defeats its own purpose. Everything is presented as something unique, unheard of, outstanding. Thus, nothing is unique, unheard of, outstanding. Totality of the superlative means totality of the mediocre because it levels the presentation of human life to the presentation of merchandise." Lowenthal observed that superlatives as they were used was about heroes of consumption. At first superlatives were insgnificant until their real functions were discovered.

Malapropric Malapropism

It is important to segue into television to view Archie Bunker's use of language. Rosa and Escholz say that: Archies comand of language is "legionary"; viewers have witnessed him criticize Mike for reacting "on the sperm of the moment," castigate Edith for taking things "out of contest," and tell his family that his prejudices is a "pigment of their imagination". Archie uses malapropism[the inappropriate use of a word in place of another that has some similarity to it]. In his situational comedy show, Archie uses malapropisms as follows: "What is this, the United Nations? We gotta have a whole addenda ? I come home to tell you one o' the greatest antidotes of all times, an item of real human interest, and you sit there like you are in a comma. You sound like a regular Billie Sol Graham! "Sorry" ain't gonna clench my thirst ... as one of your faithful constitutionals . You gotta grab the bull by the corns and heave-ho. This nation under God shall not diminish from the earth. I do not need their whole Dun and Broadstreet. We got a regular Edna St. Louis Millet here. If he don't yell "pig" or none of them epaulets .... Ain't he took the exercise tax off a cars? No, Edith, I was out expectin' the street lights... For better or for worse, in secrets and in health till death do us part? It's like trying to make a sow's purse outta silk! Whoever sent 'em obviously wanted to remain unanimous . I'll believe that when hell freezes under."

If Archie is a modern master of the malapropism, he is also a prolific creator of barbarisms- made-up or malformed words produced by false analogy with other legitimate words. Like malapropisms, barbarisms reflect ignorance and often pretentiousness on the part of the person who uses them. Here is Archie's usage: "What am I, clairavoyage or somethin'?... what you call, connubible difficulties... It's gonna take a lotta thinkin' and it's gonna take all my consecration. One of these days I will probably dehead myself. It was said under dupress .... making you an excessity after the fact! It's a regular of facsamile of the Appolo 14. Like the Presidential, the Senatorial, the Governororial ,the Mayorororial ... These things ain't exactly hairlooms , you know. What do you mean by that insinuendo ? Back to the groinocologist! She's hanging around my neck like an Albacross! He had the inforntery to imply that... what you might call a certain lack of drive- you know, personal inititianative. Make this meathead take the literacy test. I remember some of the beauties you hung around with, and they wasn't exactly no "Madonises "

Radio Ether

Radio has changed. Dr. Lawton tells us that: "Face up to the fact that, like it or not, from the bowels of radio has come a new art form. The practitioners of the new art are the managers of the "screamer" stations,.... stations with an extreme foreground treatment, playing only top tunes,with breathless and witless striplings making like carnival barkers." Today's radio chief purpose is to make money for those who control and use its mechanical devices. It threatens to prove as great a a disappointment as the moving-picture for those who sense radio's underdeveloped power as an agency of education,culture, and international good-will. According to Marshal McLuhan, "to the student of media, it is difficult to explain the human indiference to social effects of those radical forces. The phonetic alphabet and the printed word that exploded the closed tribal world into the open society of fragmented functions and specialist, knowledge and action have never been studied in their roles as a magical transformer. The history of radio is instructive as an indicator of the bias and blindness induced in any society by its pre-existent technology."

But Paul Lazarsfeld put it this way: "The last group of effects may be called the monopolistic effects of radio. If a government monopolizes the radio, then by mere repetition and by exclusion of conflicting points of view it can determine the opinions of the population. We do not know much about how this monopolistic effects really work. The Germans under Hitler danced entranced to the tribal drum of radio that extended their central nervous system to create depth involvement for everybody. Media can imprison the audience through government censors and information gate-keepers. It can also be free as demonstrated by Dave Mickie the Disc-jockey: "That's Patty Baby and that's the girl with the dancing feet and that's Freddy Cannon there om the David Mieckie Show in the night time ooohbah how are you booboo. Next we'll be Swinging on a Star and ssshhhwwoooo and sliding on a moonbeam. Waaaaaa how about that ... one of the goodest guys with you ... this is lovable kissable D.M. in the p.m. at 22 minutes past nine o' clock there,, aahhrightie, we're gonna have a Hitline, all you have to do is call WA 5-1151, WAlnut 5-1151, tell them what number is on the Hitline." Dave Mickie alternately soars, groans, swings, sings, solos, intones and scampers, always reacting to his own reactions. He moves entirely in the spoken rather than the written area of experience. It is in this way that the audience participation is created. The spoken word involves all of the senses dramatically. his is designed to suck-in and grab the listeners attention and faculties. This is free radio using spoken language to express itself and it listeners.

Action Verbiage

American speech is energetic and picturesque. The sports pages in the newspapers, uses jargon not too desirable but some times affected. These newspapers utilize action verbs throughout the football season. A few of these were gathered from weekend review of a miscellaneous assortment of daily papers, from small publications to the metropolitan press: "Duke annexes victory; Iowa bags tie with Mississippi; Ohio State beats Badgers; Lawrence belts Monmouth; Illini blast Indiana; Gophers bounce Indiana; Tulane bumps Mississippi; Oklahoma bowls over Nebraska; Michigan buries Northwestern; Duke conquers North Carolina; Ohio crushes Minnesota; Anderson drubs McKendree; Oklahoma edges Texas." Then there are additional expressions like: "batters, bows to, deals a blow, shatters hopes, squelches, swats and other common terms like wins, loses, beats, defeats, overcomes, outscores and so forth. With this kind of verbiage, there seems no problem that sports will stagnate or that the football game lose its many and enthusiastic artists in the field of athletic ballyhoo.

Final Thoughts on the Word and Speech

Words help help us understand the books, news and other reading formats we have much easier. They open the world and broaden understanding. Anybody who reads a lot can imagine the new world that has been opened. Books in reality makes our lives truly free. Prince Modupe, in Africa, on encountering the written word, wrote; "The one crowded space in Father Perry's house was his bookshelves. I gradually came to understand that the marks on the pages were trapped words Anyone could learn to decipher the symbols and turn the trapped words loose again into speech. The ink of the print trapped the thought; they could get no more get away than a doomboo could get out of a pit. When the full realization of what this meant flooded over me, I experienced the same thrill and amazement as when I had my first glimpse of the bright lights on Kornarky. I shivered with the intensity of my desire to learn to do this wondrous thing myself." Words in a book helps us revise them, read about them and the thoughts that they convey in the process, make us enlightened and knowledgeable. We are also enabled by knowing these words to speak fluently and clearly. Language today is the main accelerator and curtails space as the main factor in social dialogue and arrangements. The spoken word involves all of the senses dramatically, though literate people tend to speak as connectedly and casually as possible.

Word on Speech

Marshal McLuhan writes: "The widely separate characters of the spoken and written words are easy to study today when there is ever closer touch with non-literate societies. One native, the only literate , member of his own group, told of acting as a reader for the others when they received their letters. He said he felt impelled to put his fingers to his ears while reading aloud, so as not to violate the privacy of their letters. This is interesting testimony to the values of privacy fostered by the visual stress of phonetic writing. Such separation of the sense, and of the individual from the group, can scarcely occur without the influence of phonetic writing. The written word spells out in sequence what is quick and implicit in the spoken word." "Without language", Bergson suggests, "human intelligence would have remained totally involved in the objects of its attention. Language does for the intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. Language extends and amplifies man, but it also divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this technical extension of consciousness that is speech.(McLuhan).

In the final analysis, language is our ability to transmit thoughts and ideas by using words. But with the introduction of electricity and new technologies and techniques , a new form of speech is lying on the horizon of future human speech. McLuhan puts it this way: "Our new electric technology that extends our senses and nerves in a global embrace has large implication for the future of language. Electric technology does not need words any more than the digital computer needs numbers. Electricity points the way to an extension of the process of consciousness itself, on a world scale, and without any verbalization whatever. Such a state of collective awareness may have been the preverbal condition of men. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant translation of any code or language into any any other code or language. The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentacostal condition of universal understanding and unit. The next logical step would seem to be, not translate, but to by-pass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness. This is the condition of "weightlessness," that biologists say promises a physical immortality may be paralleled by the condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace." This would be very interesting to see if Internet and language would bring about a global speechless but cyber-conscious community without speech impediments.

Cyber Babble

"We are on the on-ramp of the Information Superhighway- the engine's running- but we don't really know where we are going yet."(NBC vice-president) There is also a new language that has developed out of our surfing the Web. The new media stresses certain characteristics more than the older forms like print, radio, film or television. (i)They involve computers at basic levels of person(s)-with-person(s). Take note that: "That there is the shift from isolated single-author writing to "word processing" which often involves multi-author manipulation of text(Heim, 1987); shopping via the World Wide Web or researching via on-line databases like Lexis/Nexi or dialog;highly interactive, talk-like writing via e-mail and electronic bulletin board services." (ii) They involve merged media, merged human senses, and thus more immersive experiences. Consider: "The extent to which satellite digital technology, computers, and phone lines have merged to facilitate viewer participation with, and control over, a myriad of specialized television channels; how virtual reality" simulations immerse individuals' experience immediately in sensation that both are, and aren't, "present"- how virtual travelers can at the same time "be there" without leaving "here"(Rheingold, 1991) (iii) They shift message responsibilities, thus involving audiences more as co-authors than as receivers: "The branching choices invited by hypertext software, the versatile vastness of CD-ROM technology, and the multitude of "user"- determined choices in videodisks and CDs, all of which make messages available differently to different persons. (iv) They arrange time and place sensibilities. Consider: "the linear cause-to-effect and here-to-there assumptions of directness theory have given away to more multicausal views and message ambiguities; previous assurances of what is and isn't real no longer seem to apply. Our former words, our former habits of talking about communication are outmoded." (v) They blur the traditional modern concepts of power and responsibilities: it used to be clear that to "respond" to a message someone else needed to "author" it first. Now, increasingly, the respondents- to the presence of databases, for example- reauthor, reconfigure or edit messages at will." As McLuhan stated: "with Computers, we are able similarly surrounded by the medium as it expects particular actions and responses from us. The medium is simultaneously an extension of us and an environment for us." We are now using a language that comes with this medium. It is now changing the vocabulary and adding to number of new words in the English language and within society and the Web Community. It has now become cyber babble which is accelerated andt continues to shape and reshape our world, words, thoughts and language.

Walter Ong Writes: "Human communication, verbal and other, differs from the 'medium' mode most basically in that it demands anticipated feedback in order to take place at all. In the medium model, the message is moved from sender-position. In real human communication, the sender has to be not only in the sender position but also in the receiver position before he or he can send anything. To speak, you have to address another or others. People in their right minds do not stray through the weeds just talking at random to nobody. Even to talk to yourself you have to pretend that you are two people. The reason is that what I say depends on what reality or fancy I fell I am talking int, that is, on what possible responses I might anticipate. Hence, I avoid sending quite the same message to an adult and to a small child. to speak, I have to be somehow already in communication with the mind I am to address before I start speaking. I can be in touch perhaps through past relationships, by an exchange of glances, by an understanding with a third person who has brought me and my interlocutor together, or in any of countless other ways. (Words are modifications of a more-than-verbal situation.) I have to sense something in the other's mind to which my own utterance can relate. Human communication is never -one-way. Always, it not only calls for response but is shaped in its very form and content by anticipated response. To formulate anything I must have another person or other persons already in mind. this is the paradox of human communication. Communication is intersubjective.The media model is not. There is no adequate model in the physical universe for this operation of consciousness, which is distinctly human and which signals the capacity of human beings to form true communities wherein person shares with person interiorly, inter-subjectively. (Ong)

The Internet is changing English and the Way we Speak

The new media trend internet is slowly changing the English language and the ways we speak. Because many people are using mobile phones texting, twittering, facebook, blogging, instant messaging and chat rooms o communicating with each other more than meeting up and chat. During this process of communicating with one another. people use short and simple words to express themselves. This creates a situation whereby the internet is changing the English language and the importance of the English language in their societies.By using the internet, it becomes much more easier to do research and find data fast. Less time is spent on finding information a person needs. But sometimes there is always a lot of irrelevant information making it hard for researchers to finnish their reports and projects.Communicating by typing, people tend to use short form or so-called "internet Slang to talk with each other, it's also much faster than typing the whole word out. These examples can be seen in the first and Hub photo of the Hub above.

After using internet slang frequently, when people meet up they use use internet slang with each other. However, not many people know exactly what it means and it affects the meaning of the sentence that they are trying to express. Even for work, proper presentation, good English language pronunciations is still important and needed. . Through using the internet, peoeple of all nationalities can converse together. They may be from different countries, internet slang makes it possible and easier for anyone of them to communicate with each other. This makes it possible that when exposing oneself to other languages to slowly be influenced by or changes the way one speaks not by grammar patterns or verb endings, but by the style of the language used in the internet to communicate with one another.

However, according to David Crystal, Professor of Linguistics (Science Daily, 2005), The expression of writing casualness that have considerably increased since the advent of the internet can in fact be considered as an innovation that "allows all of us to explore the power of the written language in a creative way." Language change that is steered by internet use is being viewed upon as a foundation for studies regarding language development within a new media. Soanes (2006) of Oxford Dictionaries also stated that the growing language change ushered by the internet can be seen as a learning experience, even explaining that "spelling isn't fixed and can change over the years... you only have to look back 100 years when word 'rhyme' was spelled 'rime'. Undoubtedly, the internet, though it may have had a few setbacks especially for English Learning and Teaching, have only made us realize that language would always be evolving. there would always be language changes; indeed, we have witnessed the difference of Old English to English we know today. The internet has only expanded the typical range and variety to particularly graphical ' written communication (Thorne, 2003) Understanding and acquiring new genres of communication are entirely decisive to the process of becoming a capable communicator. In a world where a lot of technologies are growing like mushrooms every minute and where people find new ways of communicating given their insatiable need for social acts, it is imperative that everyone must at least keep an open eye in observing significant phenomena such as language change - unless we want to be "LOL'ed" at for our indifference to changes in the 21st century. English is something that will never be permanent and will constantly be changed by technology. the fact that so many people are using those myriads of new terms uniformly, we can say that the internet is becoming "the" global language. Technology is the new vocabulary

For us to be able to speak we have to use language. We tend to think of language and money, electronic media, and other technologies as tools, but we tend to discount the degree to which our tool determine who we are and what we do. Language itself is a technology, a "tool" made by people. But the tool draws a circle around the realm of the thinkable beyond which few can negotiate. (Ong) Language and speaking are the main issues we need to stay clear about whenever we talk about the new and emerging techniques, technologies and the gadgets that go along with them.