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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (79040)	11/12/2003 1:23:28 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

In his new book, Dr. Crystal examines the flexibility and future of this medium, noting linguistic practices ranging from the surprising survival of the Anglo-Saxon plural ending -en in Net slang (as in "vaxen" as a plural of VAX computer) to details on who brags more on academic newsgroups (men) and the probable demise of smiley faces. Dr. Crystal, known to many in the United States for his dry comments on language on National Public Radio, undertook his new book because he was unable to find one on the subject. "The Internet provided a wonderful opportunity for linguistic research," he said, describing his careful sifting through the sorts of punctuation-bereft, rambling text more familiar to an online discussion than an encyclopedia article. The methods Dr. Crystal used to amass his language samples for analysis were sometimes quite different from those employed by, say, James Murray, who used an iron shed in his garden called the Scriptorium to store the slips of paper bearing sample sentences that would one day constitute the Oxford English Dictionary. Dr. Crystal sat in his study in front of a computer, perusing the transcripts of virtual reality games, reams of e-mail and Web pages, and the unbuttoned language of chat rooms — "the nearest we are likely to get to seeing writing in its spontaneous, unedited, naked state," he wrote. Dr. Crystal argues that the evolving discourse of the Internet is quite different from writing, in part because writing's prime characteristic is its stability. "You expect writing to stay in place," he said. "When you refer to a page you've read earlier, you expect it to remain the same. You'd be very surprised if it had changed its character." That's not true for computer-mediated communication, he said, which has a characteristic fluidity reflected, for instance, in Web pages that change or in e-mail that is cut and pasted to create a new message. While the language of the Internet shares some of the spoken word's transience, it offers other traits, including a simultaneity not possible in spoken conversation. "You can have a conversation among 20 people in a computer chat room, something not even the most adroit person could accomplish at a cocktail party," he said. It is this hybrid of speech and writing that Dr. Crystal analyzes, unworried that English will be ruined by its often casual treatment. On the contrary, he argues, children who spend their day sending instant messages are in no danger of becoming illiterates. "Children know that you use crazy, geeky language on e-mail and on mobile phones, and then they are sensible when they are writing for the teachers," he said. He predicts that there will be as many ways to communicate on the Internet as there are people and circumstances. "If I leave out the punctuation in an e-mail, you don't say, `Crystal doesn't know his grammar.' You say, `Crystal's in a hurry.' " Similarly, people looking for a job will construct their e-mail quite differently than they would if chatting with friends. For his book, Dr. Crystal surveyed manuals and style guides that offer advice on how to write on the Internet. For instance, one of the books advised not starting e-mail communications with "Dear," an example of what led him to characterize the bulk of these books as "depressingly prescriptive." Dr. Crystal is opposed to this approach. He feels free to begin some of his e-mail with "Dear," depending on the recipient, as well as commit many other so-called errors. "There are so many purists out there," he said. "They think language should be used by a fixed set of rules — always their rules." continued