“In mathematics you don’t understand things.
You just get used to them.”
- John von Neumann
My email message was composed of just two letters.
I was proud of it too…out-tweeting Twitter and the ultimate in digital pith.
A colleague had written a very long email outlining an elaborate schedule laced with decisions but in the end asking me if this was all feasible. With some glee, I was able to bounce her lengthy message right back to her, adding only my one word response: No.
As a word lover I like to think of this as terseness raised to the level of an art. Not quite on the level of that famous six-word story attributed to Hemingway: “For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn.” but something. Most folks, on the other hand, my colleague included, will probably see it as the further destruction of civil discourse.
At the moment Twitter is the ultimate assault but even email itself, now an antique format, raises issues like the conflict between artistry and vulgarity or brevity and gas, but there is nothing really new in this and nothing especially digital. Every leap in the technology of communication initiates the same controversies of manners and language, as we continually revamp our style of communication to match the new medium. Twitter is just the latest example but email is still considered the more common format.
In fact, despite the webbing of the globe, we are not that different in our struggles from those of our colonial ancestors for whom identical issues were raised by their own communications revolution...the birth of the postal system.
In 1692 King William II of Great Britain set the stage for this revolution by giving Thomas Neale a monopoly on all postal services in the colonies. This made it possible for the first time to send messages from point to point with some consistency. It also helped promote the idea of letters as a form of popular communication, not just announcements from authority.
Just like email, the system grew at astronomic rates to accommodate a popular hunger for discourse. In fact, more than three-quarters of the growth of the entire Federal government from 1776 to 1876 was in the post office alone. With letters becoming so common, all the issues of style and substance came into question.
In other words, the same debate we have over email.
A guide to letter writing from the 19th century lists the seven C's of proper correspondence...clear, correct, complete, courteous, concise, conversational, considerate. Nowadays it sometimes seems that only concise remains. Shorter sentences and more brusque construction are the email norm. It makes sense. The low resolution of most computer monitors and their inner glow make reading text a challenge. And most email applications display lines that are 75 characters long whereas we are used to reading lines in a book that are only 50 characters long. This makes it more tiring to read a lot of text onscreen and we can expect the trend in terseness to continue for a while.
Most of my email correspondents do not even compose complete responses to my messages. Instead, they send my own letter back to me with comments inserted. I found this insulting at first, as though they could not be bothered to compose themselves on my behalf. But the real explanation is that this is simply more efficient for the kind of details exchanged in email.
This focus on function over form gives some of my communications the feel of high seas semaphore but there is an art to that too – see baby shoes above – and leaner language may not mean thinner meaning.
Standard usage is also undergoing an assault…or renaissance depending on your point of view. As at any time of change, new words are constantly entering the lexicon.
Like all the new “e” words…the emailstrom of eologisms of the past few year. And of course the new abbreviations that everyone loves to hate… BTW, FYI, LMFAO. This too, by the way, is reminiscent of a colonial America that saw the birth of dozens of new abbreviations like C.O.D., P.D.Q., and of course the greatest shortcut of all time...O.K.
But punctuation may be in for the biggest shakeup. The comma may finally have to step aside as a bevy of new symbols come into play. Commas were fine in letter writing as a way of handling embedded thoughts but digital messaging is shallower and more intense and lends itself to the linking of ideas, to stringing statements. Punctuation becomes a kind of glue and we get dashes and ellipses and asterisks and plus signs.
The postal surge of the early 1800s, of course, led to renewed emphasis on penmanship and the creation of Copperplate and other forms of expressive, cursive writing. With email we cannot rely on such handy subtleties. But the desire to manipulate emphasis can be seen in increased use of capitals, color tints, underlining and other visual accents. Plus emoticons and dingbats that create wee graphic pictures that turn the text into a rebus.
And then there is the great unending battleground of spelling.
Purists of every age bemoan the lost craft of spelling but it is interesting to note that standardized spelling is a fairly recent phenomenon. It was not until the early 17th century that English printers began to use consistent spelling. Dictionaries, lordly tomes used to impose the will and style of the upper classes, began to appear early in the century; an Italian one in 1612, a French one in 1694. But it was not until 1755 with the publication of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary that an accepted guide was available.
Johnson’s was the first purely commercial venture, financed by a cartel of booksellers, and it succeeded in beginning the habit of standardization. But even that was challenged right away. By 1789 Noah Webster began to push for a unique American orthography to act as a "band of national union." Meaning…we’ll spell things just the way we want to, thank you very much.
Purity or variance, take your pick. Personally I am not a stickler as long as the meaning is clear and some of the email fumbles are fun. Like the lengthy message mentioned earlier in which my colleague accidentally called a seminar in a distant city a "confarence." Then, she had the nerve to even out out-pith me with her more reduced response to my terse “no.”
She quickly shot back a single letter: Y.
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