In this Era of Social Media, the written word is more important than ever.
Special two-part series!
PART I: On old English, etymology, and annoying co-workers
The world, it seems, is divided into two groups:
- Those who think spelling (and grammar, and good sentence structure) counts and are a little fanatical about it
- Those who think the people in Group #1 need to calm down, because it's not, like, life-threatening or anything
Anyone who's ever read one of my blog posts - or been the victim of one of my late-night Proustian emails - knows which group I belong to. I'm the annoying co-worker who gives you lectures on correct apostrophe use, criticizes your PowerPoint slides because you didn't use parallel sentence structure, and tries to impose an office-wide ban on Dan Brown novels on the basis that reading them will drive down the average IQ of our employees.
As I've gotten older - and, perhaps, more fatalistic - I've tried to curb my tendencies in this direction. As Stephen Fry points out in his excellent podcast, Language, no language is static: It's constantly evolving, and it's common usage, not rulebooks, which define meaning. The crochety old woman ranting about how 'prioritize' isn't a real word (because it didn't exist until c. 1978) isn't demonstrating superior intellect; she's only revealing herself to be hidebound, resistant to change, and ignorant of how language actually works.
[CLICK HERE for an interesting sidebar about the evolution of language among all creatures.]
[CLICK HERE for a sidebar on Old English proununciation and the move from an oral to written tradition.]
The 13th-century poem, 'Sumer is Acumen In', is a great example of how language changes dramatically over time. One of the first recorded poems in 'English', it looks almost like a foreign language to us now.
However, technologic advances - from the invention of the printing press to the rise of the internet - mean that more people are communicating more information across more channels than ever before. If we hope to be able to understand each other, some formal structure must be imposed.
Just as money only works if we all agree that this piece of paper represents X value, language only works if we all agree that X symbol or X combination of letters means the same thing to both of us.
THE SAME 5 WORDS CAN DELIVER 5 DIFFERENT MESSAGES
Take, for example, the
following sentences. Same words;
different punctuation - and the meaning changes dramatically:
(a) He eats, shoots and leaves.
(b) He eats shoots and leaves.
(c) He eats, shoots - and leaves.
(d) He eats; shoots; leaves.
(e) Heats, shoots and leaves.
In (a), our subject ('he') performs 3 actions (eating, shooting, leaving).
In (b), our subject performs one action (eating) on two nouns (shoots and leaves).
In (c), our subject performs 2 actions (eating, shooting) in succession, then suddenly performs a third (leaving).
In (d), our subject performs 3 actions (eating, shooting, leaving) in succession, completing each one, then pausing before moving on to the next.
In (e), a minor typo causes us to lose our subject entirely while adding a new action (heating).
In other words: The placement of a single comma can completely change the meaning of a sentence. The use of more sophisticated punctuation - like semi-colons - delivers a more nuanced text. In an era where we're more often communicating in writing with people we'll never meet, both meaning and nuance are more important than ever.
And that's why spelling and grammar are important.
Click here to read Part 2, which demonstrates the link between bad writing, bad experiences - and bad branding.
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