At the end of last week, I had an interesting conversation with a colleague. We were wondering about written and verbal communication skills in a different generation. I'll admit there were moments when I felt like some inflexible old fogie grammarian. Yet, the need to communicate clearly to different sub-groups of society is indeed a necessary skill for the professions the two of us represented. Trying to work with writing skills in classes means stating that the use of online abbreviations don't fit in professional forms of writing. They have their place, but not in a scientific paper or book review. I've learned to understand many of these terms and if all else fails, I search online to get the point -- though this is rare. We noted the use of emojis in writing, recognizing that a string of such characters carries a distinct message. My colleague noted this may not be different than hieroglyphs. That made me laugh, but it may not be far from the truth.
I've often felt that social media messages use few words and more images to convey feelings and ideas. Think of memes, gifs, photos and emojis as the start of a message or in response to the message of an another. These add to our communication abilities through the written word by noting the intonation, facial expression or body image that is missing when we aren't face to face. To me it seems that emojis are becoming a language of sorts. They are far past the emoticons that were typed online, though the new emojis take away the creativity that came with making our own symbols. Now we wait for someone else to add more symbols to the bank for choices. For example, someone was quite happy last week when a red-headed emoji was finally released. Interesting to watch this new set of communication symbols grow in number and meaning.
A song that came to mind is from a favourite New Orleans artist. Lyrics cover the differences in spoken language. Enjoy!
To Love the Language -- Harry Connick, Jr.
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