140 (Interestingly, my 139th Blogger post)

I'm new to the Twitterverse, but I've been on Facebook since before it was mainly status updates. Someone said recently (on Facebook), "Wouldn't it be weird if our minds were re-trained to think in 420 characters or less?" (That's the FB standard.) And I responded, "Or worse, 140 characters..." (the Twitter standard).

I was reading a book tonight and was getting kind of bogged down in the author's wordiness, and I flipped to the back to see if there were any kind of cliff notes. Not only were there chapter-by-chapter summaries, there actually was a tweet! 140 characters to summarize this entire book! Part of me was relieved - now I could spend 20 seconds reading the tweet and know the premise of a whole book! (Though I did still read the book. But perhaps the fact I was bored by his wordiness is caused by my familiarity with status updates and tweets.)

I was also talking recently with a guy who teaches some college classes (Psych, maybe?) at a community college, and he was talking about how awful the grammar was in these papers he gets, how he'll get "ur" written in a formal paper, and it really bugged him that these college students don't know how to write.

And I'm wondering how technology is changing the English language. I'm no historian so I don't know anything about the transition from the old English you read in Shakespeare and explorer's journals to the English we know today. But something happened to change the English language dramatically, whether it was a gradual or sudden shift.

I'm wondering if "ur" will become the new standard for your and you're. If all those txt acronyms will become the norm. As a writer it wrenches my gut to think of it...but if that's really the way our language will shift in my life time, I need to be able to adapt. If I can't write the way people understand, I'll as confusing as reading Shakespeare. (Only less classic.)