The Times: Tech column - Internetspeak/Converged gadgets
Internetspeak is changing the English language by stealth. And if you dk how to keep pace, David Rowan explains everything you ntk
IT'S that time to review the tech pundits' predictions for the past year, and reflect smugly how foolish is their art: in 2001, we were told, the dot-com bloodbath would end, third-generation phones would fly out of Dixons, and we'd all be e-mailing from our fridge. Maybe next year, guys.
Here, though, is one trend that this column can predict with absolute confidence for 2002: the Internet will redefine how we write and speak.
The process is already well advanced. We've been busily eroding the rules of spelling and capitalisation in our quest for speed: text-messaging has turned Gr8 BritN into a land of shorthand thumb-typists, who when we e-mail, will never write "Yours faithfully" when "Bestest" or "Thx" will do. As for our ever-expanding vocabulary, lexicographers cannot data mine the information tsunami fast enough to record each new tech term entering the mainstream.
But now things are getting serious. For many, the PC and mobile handset have become our principal daily communication media. As we enter 2002, around 30 million of us are online in the UK, fielding a couple of hundred million e-mails daily, and firing off 38 million text messages. We are adapting to a language that goes beyond the spoken and written conventions we grew up with. Without realising it, we are learning a radically new set of linguistic rules.
For one, we are evolving new ways to inject emotional context into otherwise flat text. Your sarcastic opinion offered to a chat-room might be misread if taken literally, but you can emphasise your intention with emoticons - facial expressions such as :-( - or abbreviations such as fotcl - "falling off the chair laughing" (see panel below). When u or i use lower-case letters, we signal how busy we are. We are even evolving new forms of punctuation to suggest emphasis, something that has become *very* common practice ;)
Then there are the new expressions that are moving faster than an instant message from the IT desk to the dictionary. Last June, the Oxford English Dictionary welcomed a raft of Internet-related terms, from smileys and cookies to FAQs and B2B. Since then, Oxford has monitored the verb "to disambiguate", meaning "to clarify", and the rather more useful "dot gone" - a dot.com start-up that just stopped. Not all the new terms are jargon: some have moved from their original tech context to enrich the broader language. Think about that the next time you're multitasking.
David Crystal, for one, is excited by the Net's impact on the English language. "The sheer scale of the Internet has convinced me that we are on the brink of the biggest language revolution ever," says Professor Crystal, whose useful new book Language and the Internet (Cambridge, £13.95) attributes the change to the new ways in which the Web makes us interact. Until now we have relied on speaking, reading or writing, but increasingly this new computer-mediated language is dominating our social relationships. He calls it "netspeak" and celebrates it as "a development of millennial significance. A new medium of linguistic communication does not arrive very often in the history of the race".
If you doubt how quickly we have adapted, glance back over that e-mail you just sent the colleague sitting three feet away, or re-read your recent text messages that, more than actually saying anything, served to remind the world of your presence. This revolution is rewriting the rules of grammar, style and syntax, and its impact has barely begun.
Let's hope that this time next year we can still understand each other. hapE nu yr ;-)
Some current netspeak abbreviations that you ntk* (*see below)
awhfy: Are we having fun yet?
dk: Don't know
dur?: Do you remember?
fotcl: Falling off the chair laughing
fya: For your amusement
hhok: Ha ha only kidding
ianal: I am not a lawyer
icwum: I see what you mean
irl: In real life
khuf: Know how you feel
ntk: Need to know
o4u: Only for you
pmji: Pardon my jumping in
rtm: Read the manual (or its abusive f-word cousin, rtfm)
t+: Think positive
tmot: Trust me on this
tuvm: Thank you very much
4yeo: For your eyes only
++++
IT'S going to be a costly year for gadget addicts. In 2002 the big tech firms plan to saturate the market with a plethora of "converged" devices that will combine computers, phones, videos and music-players in a bid to get you spending. Watch out for the first video-equipped mobile phones, handheld computers that combine phones, cameras and MP3 players, and (if Bluetooth finally gains a foothold) domestic appliances that talk to each other.
Look out for early signs of in-car computing, and the erosion of cathode-ray tubes by cheaper liquid-crystal displays. And one that might just catch on: the personal DVD cinema embedded in your sunglasses. They're called i-glasses and give the illusion of an 80-inch screen. Better get saving.
(The Times, January 7 2002)
IT'S that time to review the tech pundits' predictions for the past year, and reflect smugly how foolish is their art: in 2001, we were told, the dot-com bloodbath would end, third-generation phones would fly out of Dixons, and we'd all be e-mailing from our fridge. Maybe next year, guys.
Here, though, is one trend that this column can predict with absolute confidence for 2002: the Internet will redefine how we write and speak.
The process is already well advanced. We've been busily eroding the rules of spelling and capitalisation in our quest for speed: text-messaging has turned Gr8 BritN into a land of shorthand thumb-typists, who when we e-mail, will never write "Yours faithfully" when "Bestest" or "Thx" will do. As for our ever-expanding vocabulary, lexicographers cannot data mine the information tsunami fast enough to record each new tech term entering the mainstream.
But now things are getting serious. For many, the PC and mobile handset have become our principal daily communication media. As we enter 2002, around 30 million of us are online in the UK, fielding a couple of hundred million e-mails daily, and firing off 38 million text messages. We are adapting to a language that goes beyond the spoken and written conventions we grew up with. Without realising it, we are learning a radically new set of linguistic rules.
For one, we are evolving new ways to inject emotional context into otherwise flat text. Your sarcastic opinion offered to a chat-room might be misread if taken literally, but you can emphasise your intention with emoticons - facial expressions such as :-( - or abbreviations such as fotcl - "falling off the chair laughing" (see panel below). When u or i use lower-case letters, we signal how busy we are. We are even evolving new forms of punctuation to suggest emphasis, something that has become *very* common practice ;)
Then there are the new expressions that are moving faster than an instant message from the IT desk to the dictionary. Last June, the Oxford English Dictionary welcomed a raft of Internet-related terms, from smileys and cookies to FAQs and B2B. Since then, Oxford has monitored the verb "to disambiguate", meaning "to clarify", and the rather more useful "dot gone" - a dot.com start-up that just stopped. Not all the new terms are jargon: some have moved from their original tech context to enrich the broader language. Think about that the next time you're multitasking.
David Crystal, for one, is excited by the Net's impact on the English language. "The sheer scale of the Internet has convinced me that we are on the brink of the biggest language revolution ever," says Professor Crystal, whose useful new book Language and the Internet (Cambridge, £13.95) attributes the change to the new ways in which the Web makes us interact. Until now we have relied on speaking, reading or writing, but increasingly this new computer-mediated language is dominating our social relationships. He calls it "netspeak" and celebrates it as "a development of millennial significance. A new medium of linguistic communication does not arrive very often in the history of the race".
If you doubt how quickly we have adapted, glance back over that e-mail you just sent the colleague sitting three feet away, or re-read your recent text messages that, more than actually saying anything, served to remind the world of your presence. This revolution is rewriting the rules of grammar, style and syntax, and its impact has barely begun.
Let's hope that this time next year we can still understand each other. hapE nu yr ;-)
Some current netspeak abbreviations that you ntk* (*see below)
awhfy: Are we having fun yet?
dk: Don't know
dur?: Do you remember?
fotcl: Falling off the chair laughing
fya: For your amusement
hhok: Ha ha only kidding
ianal: I am not a lawyer
icwum: I see what you mean
irl: In real life
khuf: Know how you feel
ntk: Need to know
o4u: Only for you
pmji: Pardon my jumping in
rtm: Read the manual (or its abusive f-word cousin, rtfm)
t+: Think positive
tmot: Trust me on this
tuvm: Thank you very much
4yeo: For your eyes only
++++
IT'S going to be a costly year for gadget addicts. In 2002 the big tech firms plan to saturate the market with a plethora of "converged" devices that will combine computers, phones, videos and music-players in a bid to get you spending. Watch out for the first video-equipped mobile phones, handheld computers that combine phones, cameras and MP3 players, and (if Bluetooth finally gains a foothold) domestic appliances that talk to each other.
Look out for early signs of in-car computing, and the erosion of cathode-ray tubes by cheaper liquid-crystal displays. And one that might just catch on: the personal DVD cinema embedded in your sunglasses. They're called i-glasses and give the illusion of an 80-inch screen. Better get saving.
(The Times, January 7 2002)
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