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You know, the written word used to be a sacred thing.
It was honoured, revered and respected. There was a magic inherent in the entire process of one person recording some thing on some medium and then another person being able to recover that message or ‘thing’ at another time and another place. The ability to take arbitrary symbols and use them to communicate was literally awesome.
Magic.
We seem to have lost that sense of wonder. Today, language is being assailed on all fronts. Grammar is neglected, spelling rests on the writer’s whim and punctuation is ignored. As a result, meaning is obscured, language tortured and true communication endangered.
Why do we make it so hard for ourselves? We have the tools to make our meaning clear. They’ve been developed over millennia, through many great civilisations and remain free to use by all!
This is not to say that there is no room for innovation; a language that refuses to change and adapt will soon be abandoned. However, there exists a foundation which has stood firm for many generations.
In this blog I will be talking about what I see happening in the written (and sometimes spoken) word. Some of it will be reflections on the beast and – no doubt – some of it will take the form of rants against verbal vandalism. There will probably be quite a bit of the latter actually …
See you soon.
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