Dear Technology - Part 2

Dear Technology,

Well, you’ve done it again.

Now you’ve gone and messed with our language. Will your madness never end?

The current generation of learners uses you to learn to speak, read and write.

You’ve infiltrated our diction as well. Your fancy lingo has permeated our daily verbiage. “Texting”, “sexting” and “facebooking” are not terms someone having survived the Great Depression would necessarily understand nor want to know.

Of course, you giveth and you taketh away.

Adding to our vocabulary is one thing but making us grammatically dumb is another altogether. Your texting and smartphone technology has modified how we express ourselves in written form. When you limit us to 140 words: punctuation & grammar r 1st 2go.

No one uses commas anymore. I must admit, sometimes that’s a good thing.

Small children exist in this world that have never actually held a book in their hands. They hold a Kindle or an iPad and touch a screen to turn pages in their Cat In The Hat.

Knowing nothing but high tech, they will expect high tech in return. Next they will expect their devices to talk back to them. Knowing you, you’ll do it too.

Or will you?

To talk back to us, first you have to understand us.

Sure, you can use your analytical skills to analyze our frequency of word use and derive patterns that intimate what we are trying to say. But do you truly understand?

You are akin to a good machine translation. You recognize a pattern and repeat it, but do you really get the nuances behinds the words?

Culture is not something you know because in your clinical mainframe world, it doesn’t exist. Your point of reference is purely analytical and language is so much more than that.

Language is backed by hundreds of thousands of years of history. It’s an organic, ever-changing entity that cannot be replicated.

Good luck with that.

Sincerely,
aiaTranslations