All the time I keep complaining that the German language is deteriorating rapidly. Young people hardly seem to have a basic knowledge and grasp of grammar, orthography and spelling. I am not perfect myself. Never have been, but even I start cringing when I have to listen to the atrocities so many people commit by merely opening their mouth.
But when I look around me and take a reality check with other languages I know and understand, then it becomes quite clear: It's happening all over. And it's happening fast!
I can smile about many things and attribute them to some kind of slang or style. I am not immediately freaking out when I hear and read "cuz" or "coz" in instead of (be)'cause, but what's the point in ravishing a word like "definitely" to "definately"? That doesn't make sense at all. No abbreviation, or cutesy "shorthand", it's just spelled wrong, wrong, WRONG!
I love reading blogs, mostly foreign language blogs, so I can practice my own skills. Hell, I even write in a foreign language! But every now and then I come across blogs that are basically funny, witty and entertaining and I would love to read them, if it weren't for the horrible language skills. So usually I drop those pretty fast, which is a pity.
Reading is a good thing. Writing is a good thing. Back in the days - when I was young - we used to read tons of books and kept a diary and had penpals to write to. Nowadays we have computers, so we write emails, blogs and online diaries. Which in itself is a great thing, because we do the same thing, only electronically. Unfortunately that way we also read bad writing, bad grammar, bad spelling and we get confused and start writing the same way and over time language changes, and we don't know what's right to begin with. We don't know how to write a word correctly, because we have seen it spelled wrong so often, that we believe that is how it's written.
I doubt that any accredited newspaper would write "definately" too?
It was definitely different when we still read books. They were spellchecked and edited by professionals. And we just took in correct spelling and grammar without even realizing. Maybe we should read books more often. Or instead of giving our kids ipods and x-boxes, stupid wargames, that make them go out and commit yet another school shooting-massacre, we should buy them the oldfashioned dictionary? Keep them occupied with doing something useful. Learning something instead of getting "dumb and dumber".
Even better: have someone programme games where you only get to the next level when you spell something right, or can answer a science question ... whatever, the possibilities are endless. Or have an ipod-dictionary? Even my stupid cellphone has a spellchecker for German, English, Spanish, Italian, Turkish and French.
Of course I know how boring school can be at times, and that so many other things are so much more interesting and cool. And even today I sometimes wonder why we had to learn certain things that - honestly, I don't even remember - and they have never done me any good in my lifetime. But other things have proven to be extremely useful, sometimes entertaining (at least now) and some things are just good to know for conversational purposes.
Times today are different. Family life is different (I am not a republican, I don't refer to family values), a lot of the stability, the boundaries and the structure that I grew up with has gone. And I am not saying that we have to take a couple of steps back to get there again. What I am saying is, that we have to find new ways to provide the same stability, structure and yes, even boundaries.
Just rambling. - and not spell-checking my ramblings either <smiles>
