Elegy: English – we hardly knew her

Ever since we lost Latin I was sure that English was doomed to be a goner just the same. Wikipedia tells me that the English language dates back to the 5th century when the Anglo-Saxons settled (conquered, whatever) in Great Britain. There is irony that I’m sourcing Wikipedia because the article I will also be referencing later on comments on today’s students depending on Wikipedia and Google as academic sources. Since this isn’t an academic paper, I figured it would be okay.

Apologies for that digression, now back to the deceased: English –truly we didn’t have enough time to know you or perhaps we just lacked the effort. A short history lesson if you will: English is the widest spoken language in the world, thanks in great part to colonial expansion of the British Empire in the 19th century. So if we had to fictitiously graph out (because I love graphs) English language speakers, it hits a high point around the late 1800s and maintains a fairly steady increase because of better primary education and thus increasing literacy rates. And then about a century later, something starts to go horribly awry. It’s not a new dialect forming, but it is becoming more and more universal and is responsible for the death of a beautiful language to a new generation.

Netspeak (which is a word not recognized by Microsoft Office 2003, I’ll have you know) has taken the instant messaging, text, email, Twitter world by storm, and is leaking into live face-to-face (“offline”, for lack of a better term) conversation and, horrifyingly, academia. Netspeak, if you didn’t already know, are abbreviations and acronyms used in online communications, examples include: OMG (oh my God), LMAO (laughing my ass off), IMHO (in my humble opinion) etc. The article I previously alluded to is from the October issue of Toronto Life. “Lament for the iGeneration” is by Gregory Levy who fittingly teaches communications at Ryerson University. He has had papers submitted to him with “4ever” instead of forever and the “Gr8 Wall of China”. Just so you know – Word does in fact recognize the combination of letters and numbers without a red squiggly, so maybe that’s how it escaped the spell check prior to handing in the paper. Maybe people are so used to typing that in netspeak it was a legitimate accident but clearly a result of very lazy proofreading. And thus, net speak has entered the realm of academia.

With respected to netspeak in “offline” communication, better (or worse) still is the last paragraph of this article which left me bewildered as well. Here it is verbatim:

Earlier this year, I told some of my students a story I’d heard. As an elementary school teacher reported to me that whenever she one of his student heard something funny, he said “LOL” –or “lawl” –as though it were a word. Instead of actually laughing, he’d taken to the vocalizing the idea of laughing out loud. Even my students couldn’t believe this debasement of communication as they understood it. They shook their heads and stared at me, open-mouthed, I knew what they were thinking: kids these days.

Great, soon we’ll be mistaking other emotional expressions in nonsensical grunts, and I’m not talking about Liz Lemon-isms (Blerg!). Furthermore, I am interested in seeing and hearing exactly what ROTFLMAO (rolling on the floor laughing my ass off) looks and sounds like.

I think a substantial part of this desecration is as a result of the brevity valued by our culture. I don’t think I can Twitter because it’s hard to keep me down to 140 characters. I feel as if Twitter and texting has completely eliminated the use of punctuation; I don’t know which is worse: sans punctuation or the repetitive use of the exclamation mark (!!!!!!!). Consequently, I use the dash more than most people and that’s three whole characters –who could afford a space and two hyphens? Though a truly underused (or misused, rather) punctuation mark is the semicolon. It’s even better than an ampersand, which I am also quite fond of. A semicolon only takes up two characters whereas & takes three. Tricks of the trade let me tell you. Character limitation also may lead to use of simple words. Not that there is anything wrong with shorter words, but to me the world is less enthralling when things can only be described as good, nice, big, fat, smart, dumb, cold, new – you get the picture. There are over 600,000 words in the English language, I haven’t met them all yet, however I haven’t met many that I haven’t liked (C U Next Tuesday, notwithstanding, not even a Vagina Monologue could change my mind).

While punctuation might be a space saving casualty it makes me think that spelling has committed suicide. Suicide takes the form of auto-correct and dependency on spell check. I’m not sure if tweets are spell checked by Firefox or whatever browser you use, but text messages sure aren’t. Oftentimes my T9 can’t presuppose the word I’m trying to spell. Spelling mistakes aren’t just those tricky words like scissors or misogyny (not sure how many people are texting about misogyny, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a tricky word to spell), however that’s not my biggest pet peeve or what I consider to be the utmost failure of the grade school language arts system. Sing it with me friends: they’re/there/their and you’re/your. I don’t know what else there (their?) is to say, really and truly, it’s not that hard.

There might be hope in years to come. I’m inspired by a closing statement in an article in the November issue of The Walrus. It’s an article about neuropsychology and our society’s dependence on GPS; I’m extrapolating its message, but I feel it really applies.

When I was a kid, I had an old Mad magazine from the 1960s that bemoaned the advent of the electric scooter and predicted that by the end of the century North Americans would look like oversized bowling pins with tiny, vestigial legs, ripe for knocking over by lean Communist invaders. Rather than forgetting how to walk, however, 4.5 million Canadians on treadmills and exercise bikes make up the miles they no longer travel in their daily lives. Many other choose to forsake “efficiency" by biking to work or walking to the supermarket, because they’ve realized that letting technology do too much leaves their bodies worse off. We may soon take the same approach with our brains.

I can only hope for the day when English makes its glorious comeback. In the meantime, I’ll continue running on the treadmill, reading and writing, and explaining the difference between irony and coincidence. To my dear English I say: I’ll miss you – say you’ll come back to us someday.

Money can buy love – a guide to understanding cell phone contracts and the fine art of dating

It was a normal Wednesday night with two urban savvy ladies meeting for dinner, a bottle of wine and intelligent chit chat, and of course I have my cell phone out and ready (see: Get your elbows off the table) in case something comes up. I hate my cell phone; yes, you LG Shine are a piece of crap. I inherited this phone when a good friend of mine sold me his contract when he moved to Macau. (Miss you!) I pay a lot less now which is an obvious plus, but this phone makes me want to die, it turns itself off all the time, I’ve been told it’s the battery that shifts around, either way it sucks. I’ve been told to call Telus and bitch and moan, but I was already told that I won’t get a new phone because I am not on a third year plan. Nor do I want to sign a three year plan because I have no idea where I’m going to be at that point.

So this whole concept of contracts and reduced rate phones got me and my friend to thinking, what if we ran our lives like cell phone companies? Tying ourselves down with contracts but giving great discounts to lure the potential consumer sounds like a good idea in theory doesn’t it? No it really doesn’t. I’m a commitaphobe in many aspects of my life; I can’t even commit to a hairstylist or favourite toothpaste. We posited if this is kind of how dating works, let me breakdown what we discovered. Maybe I’ll even include a graph.

If you’re the kind of person who likes the have the latest gadget and aren’t one to be tied down, you have to a pay a pretty premium for a new phone without the strings. The same for a date: you want something new and casual – so in order to hang onto it for a while you need to put some substantial-ish cash down. Consequently if you’re dating an older model, say one you may already have a relationship with (maybe the ‘ideal’ happenstance that you date an old friend) you don’t have to try as hard. You have a slight guarantee of a long(er) term relationship so you don’t have to put in as much of an initial buy-in. Same with phones, if you want a slightly less flashy one that you will commit to for however long term, you don’t have to pay as much – sometimes nothing at all. But I guess we don’t have the same reassurance in dating all the time, you can’t guarantee a one, two or three-year contract with a significant other.

Then somehow the significant other is not only the phone, but also the phone company too. You call to bitch and moan and try to get more out of them, sometimes you might even threaten to leave the phone company as a way to try to win more sway. However, getting out of a relationship is like getting out of a phone contract prior to its completion; it’s not the $20/month buyout, but comparable to the emotional baggage that come attached with any break up.

So if you have to have three takeaway points from this entry remember these:

1. The LG Shine is a terrible phone
2. Read your phone contracts very carefully
3. Women do talk about smart things over a bottle of wine

Get your elbows off the table – Emily Post is just jealous of your Smartphone

A few weeks ago, I was at this meeting sitting in a fancy boardroom. Even if you’re unemployed it doesn’t mean you aren’t attending meetings in the financial district on occasion. It’s another one of my methods for staving off boredom. I forget to turn my cell phone to vibrate a lot of the time; I am the person who needs that reminder before the movie. However, this time I decided to be pro-active and turn the ringer off for this meeting.

I am a firm believer that a Smartphone is really more of a business machine. For the most part, I imagine, most people don’t need to open PowerPoint presentations on a daily basis and be honest, your personal email consists of mailing lists you subscribe to and other assorted spam. I don’t have a BlackBerry, honestly I tried but those things are expensive even on a third year data plan (and I think the Pearl is stupid because it isn’t a full QWERTY keyboard) and at present I don’t have a company supporting my bbm habit. So I am a girl of the flip phone, but honestly I can T9 faster than an 11 year old. That’s an accomplishment.

During this meeting people took their iPhones and BBs out for different reasons. At one point Twitter was mentioned and someone just “had to” see what this particular tweeter was all about. Another time someone had to check their Outlook calendar to see if a date was conflicting. Whatever the reason, their phones stayed in their hands through the duration of the meeting and it was clear to see their attention waning. It is socially acceptable because they have Berries or iPhones. It is possible that they could be looking at business-related work. And for once, I’m going to give people the benefit of the doubt, I know a lot of people have to answer work emails outside of business hours, that’s why they shackle those phones to you. Availability 24/7, right? But what irks me is that people are permitted to communicate via bb or iPhone during a meeting because it could be under the guise of work-related matters, however if I pull out my archaic flip phone you immediately know I’m making some kind of outside social call, which is then utterly unacceptable.

Smartphones are popping up on tables everywhere including dinner tables. Growing up we all learned not to put our elbows on the table, so why do we put so much else on the table? At my house we never took calls during dinner, that time was for family, even if we have nothing to say to each other and just watch each other’s jowls open and shut while eating. It still goes that way in my family, but when I’m out with friends it takes a different spin. How many times do you sit at a restaurant with your friends and each of you has your phone on the table? It’s almost instantaneous: you sit down and you put your phone on the table. It’s like a pissing contest; we all whip it out as if to see whose is bigger/better?

Maybe we never grow up; maybe we all need security blankets, now they’re just security phones. I once stood in the lobby of First Canadian Place waiting for a friend to get off work and a man walked off the elevator and was waiting for someone too. It took three seconds of nervous uncomfortable fidgeting for him to take out his bb and start tapping away. What was most interesting was the sense of relief it seemed to provide to him. Maybe I read too much into these things, it’s probably because I have so much time on my hands to people watch because I don’t have a BlackBerry, so maybe I’m just jealous. Maybe we’re attached to yet another object the way we were to a blankie, except these days there’s no one to wean you off of it. Imagine being attached to your ba-ba in public now, what would Emily say?

FONTS! – I’M SO PASSIONATE ABOUT THEM THAT I’M YELLING IN CAPS LOCK

I’m still getting used to this whole blog thing, as much as I like order and uniformity, it doesn’t seem like I have much control over the layout of this page. And I like control far more than order and uniformity. There are only seven fonts to choose from – six, really because I think it kind of defeats the purpose to write in webdings.

Fonts: what a love story they are for me. I honestly don’t know how I came to love them so, but now they mean so much to me. I worked for a newspaper while I was in university. No, it wasn’t hard hitting investigating journalism; I worked for the humour paper instead. And now all the editors of the legitimate paper write for the Globe and Mail and I’m…here. Another fantastic career move for me, certainly well played. What we may have lacked in news, we made up for with creativity – and for me, that came in the form of fonts. Very little about that paper was uniform; each article headline got its own font to suit the nature of the article. And so maybe that’s where the love of fonts began.

Why are fonts important? Why are we even having this conversation? First off, this isn’t a conversation at all; it’s really just me rambling about my passion for esthetically pleasing things. For you see, in the appearance-obsessed culture we live in, fonts are just as important as making sure you don’t have food particles in your teeth.

Fonts are part of a brand; in fact some fonts are branded, unique if you will. Plenty of companies have their own fonts and you know them well too. I can’t think that I’m the only person who always thought the B of The Bay really looked more like G, am I? That would make it The Gay, but hey, maybe it’s up for interpretation. But at least it’s memorable, hopefully in a good way. There are plenty of businesses who don’t know what I’ll call the “font secret” and never get very far.

Maybe because I have a lot of time on my hands, I walk around downtown Toronto a lot where I can assure you that businesses litter both sides the streets. Every business needs a sign that’s how people know where you are. (Slight digression: unless you’re Kultura, Ultra or Spice Route where I guess only the in-crowds know where you are.) Being a student of research methods I know that correlation does not equal causation, but if you’ve ever looked at boarded up restaurants and other closed down ventures, I bet that have a terrible font on their sign. Whether you believe it or not, it’s all part of your perception of whether or not you get your haircut at certain salons, whether you stop in for a drink after work or keep on going. Amazing what these silly little fonts can do.

And if you think fonts aren’t important, I can tell you that there’s a movie about a font. Is there a movie about you? I didn’t think so. Ok fine, it’s a documentary, and I’m sure there could be a documentary about you because every single film major ends up trying to make “the next great documentary”. But Helvetica is both an awesome font and an awesome film. I only wish it was an option to write in for this blog. What I am glad of is that Comic Sans MS isn’t an option. If there was one font I wish to banish from every entering the public sphere, it’s Comic Sans. I liked that font when I was twelve years old, used to hand in reports in Comic Sans all the time. That’s about the only group of people who should ever do anything with that font. So if you want to run your business like a twelve year old, then by all means. This font actually inspires fiery anger inside me whenever I see that font in public. I’m sure that isn’t the most normal reaction, but I won’t trust anything with Comic Sans on the label, that’s for sure.

Do yourself a favour, take a quick look in the mirror and check your teeth and then take a look at what font you use to represent your brand. Just promise me you’ll stay away from Comic Sans, okay? I don’t want to have to unleash rage upon you.