“Hey, dude! Wassup?” “Nm ya..itz borin.” For all those readers who are not guilty of the heinous murder of English and, therefore, are unfamiliar with the strange language in which the first two sentences are written, the conversation basically translates to, “Hello! What's up?” “Nothing much. It's boring!” (You could say I've been found guilty of this crime myself, but I've reformed and refrained from such acts of murder ever since!)
The problem is, people think it's cool. When I first set foot in the trap of social networking sites, I couldn't understand what was going on. Then one of my friends came to my ‘rescue' and proudly showed me how she chatted with friends on Facebook using shortened and ‘trendy' words. Obviously, she thought it was cool! Cool, is it, to knock off vowels from words? I should've thought ‘a,' ‘e,' ‘i,' ‘o' and ‘u' were five letters inseparable from the English alphabet and language. But the world is carrying on without them. Or so it seems. And what's so cool about replacing ‘s' with ‘z' and ‘th' with ‘d'? “Wht plnz 4 d day?” (Again, for the benefit of the innocent ones, it means, “What plans for the day?” You see, apparently, it's also cool to intermingle the number system with the English alphabet.)
Not only are vowels knocked out but also words are cut short or spellings changed to suit their pronunciation, ruthlessly omitting silent letters since they appear useless. I couldn't make out what ‘osum' was until repeated chanting of the word brought the pronunciation close to ‘ awesome'. Also, ‘obvio' is short for ‘obviously', ‘serio' for ‘seriously', and what's more, people are using these short cuts while speaking too! I regularly hear my classmates cursing Shakespeare for his ‘wierd' English. I wonder how Shakespeare would react if he came back to the earth and saw a Facebook conversation between two teenagers. He'd probably die all over again!
The reason for this cannot be that people are too lazy to type out the whole word, since it's also the latest fashion to change ‘man' to ‘mahn,' ‘my' to ‘mah' and ‘hot' to ‘hawt.' So the only reason seems to be that everyone is keen on being a part of this new trend of mutilating words, and appearing cool in front of peers.
English, with all its nuances in pronunciation, silent letters, homonyms and intricacies in meaning, is a beautiful language. I believe it is a terrible crime to disfigure and ruin such a language — a crime for which no one is convicted, a crime for which no jury hands out a punishment. Yet, it is a crime. I rest my case.
(The writer's email ID is: akhilapingali@yahoo.in)
