The mother tongue

The word “email” used to have a hyphen in it. “E-mail.” We all wrote it that way for years. Then, seemingly without warning, the mysterious “they” decided it was time to drop the hyphen, sparing humanity from that one extra keystroke. I was never notified about this. Never got a text, never got a phone call ... never even got an email, which, if you stretch your imagination, is sort of ironic. Plenty of tax season reminders and fake Facebook notifications from solicitous robots in the ol’ inbox, but no language alerts. It peeves a guy, being caught unawares like that.

 

I simply read it one day and thought it was a typo. Thankfully, I was surrounded by editors at the time who were somehow appraised of this subtle linguistic evolution. “The hyphen’s been dropped,” they told me. A minor betrayal bubbled under my skin. I kept writing “e-mail” for weeks because it was burned into my muscle memory, like the invincibility code for Grand Theft Auto III. (Holy crap that’s a specific reference.) I didn’t want to let it go, because not only did the old way feel right, but “email” is just a strange-looking word. I’m pretty sure it’s a common middle name in many French-Canadian families.

 

It’s no secret that language evolves over time, like animals and styles of pants. Just crack open some Dickens, or read through Benjamin Franklin’s old correspondence. Many of the words are the same, and the meaning is comprehensible, but it clearly doesn’t resemble our modern tongue, with our shortcuts and smiley faces and fragmented lingo. You don’t expect to hear anyone in modern day America exclaim, “Forsooth and verily! A weight must be lifted from your unconscionable bosom, you scallywag, for you’ve absconded with the queen’s jewels!” Likewise, you’d never hear Thomas Jefferson utter, “Dude, this is whack, yo.”

 

But it seems like language is evolving at a faster clip these days, and I’m putting the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Internet – that cats-and-smut behemoth that’s shrunk the globe to about the size of a tight-knit hippie commune. Linguistic tweaks have accelerated along with the pace of everything else, bullied along the breakneck highways of fiber optic cables and Wi Fi connections. The changes are hard to keep up with, and when they come, it’s usually some foul degradation, like NSFW, which is shorthand for “not safe for work,” and “JLIASM,” which means “Jeff Lagasse is a stud-muffin.” All right, so the latter’s not so bad.

 

In days of yore, when shepherds quaffed muddy mead and a gimpy donkey wagon was considered speedy travel, words were slow to spread; in turn, any changes were mostly local and slow-moving. Remnants of this hyper-locality are around today. Just look at Great Britain. It’s mostly confined to a couple of small islands in the north Atlantic, yet it’s home to so many dialects and accents it strains the ear to keep them all straight; English is routinely stretched and warped as if in a funhouse mirror, leaden and bulky in one territory, sinewy and lithe in the next. It’s a living fossil of the language’s roots. The difference is that, rather than being displayed in a museum, it’s preserved in the conversation of locals, strained through mouthfuls of meat pie and laden with colorful curse words that could make a sailor blush. Note to self: Visit Great Britain, soak in the salty talk, and use it in rush hour traffic.

 

Decades ago, my grandfather married a delightful woman from Scotland. She had lived in the United States for most of her adult life, and was pretty well assimilated, but there remained in her speech a thick soup of old-world dialect. Once you got over the fact that she put ice cubes in white wine, you honed in on her conversational style, which was casual but informed by a certain correctness that’s all but missing now. Her long O’s and A’s were squashed under the muddy bootheel of her Scottish inflection, but if one were to read her words in print, they’d be crisp and clean, unencumbered by the shortcuts and abbreviations of so-called netspeak. She said “Oh my God” instead of “OMG.” Hand her a chat room transcript and her brain would explode. Let’s all take a moment to consider how bodaciously gross that would be.

 

The reason is evident: These new-fangled linguistic quirks took place within  a couple of generations, not stretched over centuries of gradual refinement. There’s been a lot of talk about the generational divide that’s taking place, but much of it is focused on the day-to-day use of technology itself, not on how that technology has affected our communications. “Bits” and “bytes” are words in common usage. “Streaming” now refers to more than just rivers and pee. It’s an exciting time to be working at Merriam-Webster.

 

There’s something else happening, too. With people from across the world maintained in constant connectivity, the language is slowly being homogenized and stripped of its local character. Evidence of this is smattered throughout the Internet. There’s a young woman named Melissa who keeps a vlog on YouTube (“vlog” is short for “video blog”), and though she’s British, her admittedly accented speech is riddled with Americanisms and jargon birthed in the great digital ether – like, totally. She is, in part, a product of a connected age. Colloquialisms are no longer forged within physical boundaries on a map, but in a nebulous networld, one in which everything influences everything else. Imagine a world in which “Ayuh” ceases to be a hallmark of Maine slang. It could happen. And it’ll be a sad day when it’s uttered no more.

 

It’s hard for a guy to keep pace with all the changes. There needs to be some notification system in place, a framework for letting us all know what’s happening to our increasingly unfamiliar tongue. Email alerts would probably be the best bet. Or is it “EmAiL” now? I can never keep track of these things.