MASSACRE OF LANGUAGE GOES ON

In the hustle and bustle of today's extra busy, ultra charged life, language is being massacred at the altar of convenience. If the purpose of language is to communicate, then I am afraid we are doing very little communication.


What has made matters worse is the availability of SMS - the short message service - that has created a lingo of its own that deserves a dictionary. Otherwise how are you expected to understand a message like: tx 4 cmg hm?


Another arena for bad writing is face book. I do not see why people feel they should use a language that only they can understand on face book. One feature of such language is words with no vowels at all. I hardly read some peoples messages on face book because they are so poorly written. I fail to understand why I should read invest time reading something that the writer cannot write well.


I blame our education for this linguistic mess. In school, your composition or essay was given a high grade because you used big words or idioms and proverbs that no else understood! We came to believe that using big words and phrases showed that you were clever and smart. Poh!

Organizations are actually competing to show who can use big words in their mission statements and documents. There is no end to this hideous uniformity of words. If its an NGO, their communication  must have mobilization and sensitization, if it is the media it must say there was a crisis or a row, if it is a company, it must use value addition and solutions provider. Who approves this writing before it gets out there?


As for government, do not even think about it. You almost suspect that government offices use words and phrases to hide what people want know. This reminds me of the saying that a bureaucrat is someone who turns every solution into a problem?

Honestly lets put some effort in using plain language that says  what we mean...