The Cynic
♥ These Perfect Abattoirs ♥
- 845
- Posts
- 15
- Years
- Pavonis Mons
- Seen Jan 28, 2012
This is different. Children wearing thongs isn't appropriate. Children being given an A+ for text-talk in a formal writing isn't appropriate either, but it's permitted, since children don't practice their spelling enough (Spell Check does everything) and texting is popular.
Children playing on the Internet and texting? All right, but there's a limit. You shouldn't be able to text at the table instead of talking with your parents. If you're texting more than you're eating, there's an issue lol
Meanwhile, I read up some disturbing things. There are some kids who start masturbating at the age of eight. You don't learn about sex-ed until you're ten, and most parents don't even discuss it until at least ten. I just feel that there's something wrong with a kid, girl and boy, masturbating at eight years of age. I don't think that happened a few decades ago.
That just shows how awkward and weird the world has changed. Really. Eight? Jeez! Some kids even start dry humping each other at four, saying "It feels good." Seriously, wtf?
What is so wrong or disturbing about kids wanting to know about their own bodies? They have a right to know! You're suggesting we bring kids up in a little bubble of rainbows and fairies and unicorns and golden pixie dust (so on, so on). Where curiosity is seen as smutty, or even dangerous.
Also, language is a living, sentient organsim. It evolves. My favourite way of describing language is using this Stephen Fry quote:
Stephen Fry said:Think of London. Some of its outline was determined by the Romans who conquered it two thousand years ago, since then atop the ruins of the Roman, Saxon, Dark Age and Norman London was constructed a medieval city of winding streets, jostling half-timbered mansions and soaring stone cathedrals and churches. Then came, after the Tudor and Jacobean palaces and halls and after the restoration a period of renewed classical elements, the squares and avenues of Georgian and Regency London, elegant, spacious and harmonious. The Victorians brought long suburban streets, warehouses, libraries, schools, town halls and railway stations and in the twentieth century arrived a new architecture, office towers, corporate headquarters, airports, housing projects in glass and concrete, American and European statements of self conscious modernity, statehood, brutalism, socialism, capitalism and democracy. It isn't I think, too much of a strain to see the history of our language in similar terms. A long sticky flypaper onto which at varying times of their importance the church, royalty, aristocracy, industry, commerce and international entertainment have accreted themselves. Saxon and Roman elements overlaid with the Norman French and Chaucerian and Church medieval English. A great renaissance of Shakespeare, the Bible of King James, Milton and Dryden leading into the classical English of Johnson and Pope. The Victorian English of industry, Dickens and music hall giving way to the English of the twentieth century, all the way through the arrival of radio and cinema, the political language of fascism, communism, socialism and finance, the Americanisms, the street talk, the rock and roll, the corporate speak, the computer jargon … and here we are. Glass and concrete sentences right next to half-timbered Elizabethan phrases, a Starbucks of an utterance dwelling in an expression that once belonged to a Victorian banker, an Apple Store of an accent in a converted Georgian merchant's lingo.
So what if language is now evolving to include text speak? Shakespeare created new language when he was around. Twitter and Facebook are the new Hamlet and Macbeth. Let use be our lexicographer!