Grammar, Thou Art A Dying Relic

Language. It’s the most powerful tool. It’s what we use to communicate. Communicate our ideas, our feelings, and our needs. And every language needs grammar.

If language is a machine, grammar is the instruction manual to make it run efficiently. But somehow, we may have started to think that grammar’s not all that important.

SMS. Short Message Service. As much as a boon that it has been for speedy communication, the curses that it has put on us are way bigger.

Let’s talk about Tenosynovitis for a bit. It’s the inflammation of the thumbs you get from excessive texting. But that is curable. What I really want to talk about is a disease, a curse that is way more ingrained in us than we can even begin to imagine.

I’m talking about the ‘SMS lingo’, the ‘#YOLO Syndrome’.

Across the world, teachers who correct answer sheets after the exams have come across words and sentences that don’t even make sense.

Case in point:

For most of us, it’s not a big deal. They can read the above text with ease. The rest of us however, fail abysmally at it.

I admit, I was one of them. I too had initially used the SMS lingo with élan initially, when I got my first cell phone. But eventually, good sense hit me. I find it rather difficult to read the shortened and modified and improvised texts now.

The problems with this trend, as has been already exhibited partly, are diverse. This list is my attempt to enumerate a few important ones among them:

1)    It ruins your language. You simply cannot expect to be efficient at switching between the SMS lingo and normal language.

2)      It may be misunderstood. We all know the joke about a mother writing ‘LOL’ after messaging about the death of a relative to her son. She thought it meant ‘Lots of Love’.

3)      It gives a negative impression. Do not use this kind of language with people of importance, and expect to be in their good books. It instantly gives them an impression of insincerity.

4)    Most people find it difficult to spell even common words like ‘tomorrow’ after constantly typing it as ‘2moro’.

Even though it might seem a trivial matter at this stage, the repercussions later in life could be catastrophic. Imagine sending an email to the CEO of a top notch multinational, and you goof up by typing the same ‘SMS lingo’ you use with friends. I assure you he/she won’t be very impressed.

So here it is that I conclude by saying that you can’t change yourself overnight. Even though you may not intend it to or think that it can, but it still will hamper your communication in ways you can neither imagine nor like.