hello everyone
Today I watched Morning Live on SABC2 just as they were reading viewers emails, phew am I glad they asked the question: why do we go school amd get educated. This was due to an email that contained sms lingo which used words such as dem and de instead of them and the. It is becoming the norm among social networking sites to find words misspelt or rather reinvented and even more mind boggling is the growing trend to confuse words that start with the same letter and share the last two letters yet mean totally different things such as live and leave.
I want to say kudos to Vuyo and Lee-Anne for noting the atrociousness of spelling in today's society and prompting the question why then do we need education if we are to massacre existing grammar to such lengths. Some will tell you that there is no school for pronunciation and my question to them is how often do they pick up a dictionary to search for either the spelling or meaning of a word because it is all provided in one, dictionaries even tell u which part of speech or grammar a word is and gives you the words correct tenses, so, why then must we find means to kill existing words.
Yet the most upsetting thing in all of this is the unwillingness of those who misuse diction or misspell words to be corrected by others. I think the assumption lies in being better off or just or something or other and for some I think they lay claim to the notion of being infallible which is a deadly ruse. We are not always right in all we do and there is always room to learn something new each day. When someone corrects either your diction, spelling or even your grammar it means they wish you to present the best image of self at all times, be grateful for them.
p.s. : Just because someone else's pronunciation of your language is incorrect, does not mean that you should follow suit and do the same, instead it is wiser to lead by example. Someone one said: " Be the change you wish to see in the world."
p.p.s If there are any spelling or grammatical errors please feel free to use your read pen in the commentary box
intombi yakwa nkomo iyabulela
thank you for taking time out to read this blog post
oh my friend well said vha, I think this all started with that stupid mxit crap cause before then people wrote full words and proper sentences in sms. Yazi I was shouting at my cousin on Sunday, she wrote some long ass status on fb and she used mxit and abbreviations throughout the whole thing. I couldn't understand what the hell she wrote and that was after I read the damn thing three times I was so pissed off cause I had to spend a good 20mins trying to figure out actually guessing what each abbreviation meant
ReplyDeletei think some if not most people tend to abbreviate at the incorrect time and some rarely realise that you could find ways to shorten the length of what you would like to say through editing rather than abbreviating every word. like honestly if they cut out the repetetively redundant information the message would not confuse nor bore the reader as it would be precise and to the point rather than infuriating.
ReplyDeletehalalala Zomzi... yhu! It works my last nerve when people write like that... on Facebook there are two Unathi Lwanas and my sister uses her phone to access that application. She says she realised she could tell us [the other Unathi and I] apart because I used proper English; and I wrote out my words in full.
ReplyDeleteIn essense I use predictor text on my phone [including Mxit when I used to Mx] because I find that I type faster that way. I will only use abbreviated words when I don't have enough characters [and that hardly happens]. I find it absolutely annoying when I receive a text message about six words long and four of those words are shortened! I hope more poeple are taking note of the injustice we are doing to language with text lingo; all languages.