The Smiling Assassin

This ingenious,insidious little creature has also snuck into official communication. Somehow formal exchanges have expanded to include smiling faces,winking faces and sad faces. In fact,they are considered acceptable tools of conveying a message. I guess I missed the whole movement when personal emotions were deemed an essential part of professional missives. If I had a rupee for every single email I get with a blasted graphic—the smiley particularly pops up every time the sender has forgotten to do their job—I could quit my job and retire.

But this callous approach to communication got me thinking. Smilies are most often used by people who aren’t particularly good with the English language. Otherwise they would know there is a specific word for every single emotion/action in the dictionary and they would use it. The tragedy is that these days most users of the language are not competent to be using the language. But since they insist on forcing it they think that slang,short forms and cartoon characters are acceptable. They don’t even know that they are erring on the side of the heinous.

India has one of the largest number of English-speaking people—aside from the sheer size of our population,it is also considered the language of upper mobility. And yet we choose to mangle it in the name of colloquialism. For example,most newspaper subeditors genuinely believe that the phrase chatting up is the correct way to state that two people are talking. Er,in case you don’t know: Chatting up has sexual undertones and chatting with means a conversation.

Perhaps the fault lies within the language itself. English is neither stuffy nor arcane. It is a peripatetic creature that embraces commonly used words as its own. Therefore an originally French word,joie de vivre,is in the Oxford dictionary. And so is a Hindi word like masala. Perhaps this democratic approach allows it the cause for its ruin. Its malleability is mistaken by us to denote leniency.

But I don’t think so. English is not a difficult language to learn. Which is why,it has become the language of global communication. I think in our rush to “de-colonise” ourselves and to establish “regional supremacy” we have deemed English as the final barrier. And since no political party or college lecturer is willing to take up cudgels on its behalf I don’t see how we can rescue the language from its current state of decay.

So I guess since I can’t beat them I will have to join them. But be warned in advance: If you get a smiley from me in any form of communication it won’t mean happy,shiny faces. It will mean quite the opposite. Exactly like you meant it.

Nonita Kalra is Editor-In-Chief,Elle