Love the book True Grit. Fantastic dialogue. Even those who’ve only seen the movie are inclined to comment on the manner of speech.
It’s partly because our language is disappearing.
The OMGs and LOLs are contributing, no doubt, but words were becoming a problem long before cellphones and texting. We can’t say long words anymore. I don’t know if we’re unable to mouth them, or just don’t have the time.
One of the latest of the bothersome abbreviations: APP. There have been any number of comics strips in the newspaper touching on it. Pickles, the grandfatherly strip carried daily in the Tulsa World had its main character remark that he’d seen so many commercials about “an app for that,” that he had to lay down and take “an app.” Naps notwithstanding, there is confusion among the non-techs about the meaning.
Application. Say it. Application. It does take a little longer, and in the commercial it would have been impossible to repeat over and over “there’s an application for that.”
As a language lover, I find it is troublesome to lose words over fads, products, or altered perceptions. Application has become App, at least in this application.
Cellular phones became cells. With further abbreviation they turned into cels. Lose a pesky L. Facsimile machines became faxes. We used to have medications, now just meds. The Miami Hurricanes became the ‘Canes. Florida Seminoles? The ‘Noles. The temperatures got too extreme and became temps. Where amused responses once ruled, there is merely an 😉 .
Kristen Glover touts her Dad’ll-Do-It!’s car dealership at “I-44 Memorial.” The intersection disappeared. It is no longer at I-44 AND Memorial. Anywhere we can lose a word or a syllable or two – apparently, we must.
ROFL.
Therein lies the guilty pleasure of True Grit. It is set in the late 1800’s, when people still enjoyed the eloquence of conversation, sentences filled with words of the literate in quantities sufficient enough to require commas. There was nothing else to do back then but listen to the speaker, and speak they did.
Download the book, if you must. There’s an App for that. Let’s read.
Yawna? (Do you want to?)
