Mind your language

WHR u b? M wtng 8 crsrds. It8217;s not necessary to cut this long-running story short to decipher the message. Sweet and short, that8217;s...

WHR u b? M wtng 8 crsrds. It8217;s not necessary to cut this long-running story short to decipher the message. Sweet and short, that8217;s the language of the times. And it8217;s being spoken everywhere: from the suburbs of Mumbai to the interiors of a village in Gujarat, from a not-so-accessible stretch of the highway to the inside of a pulsating discotheque 8212; from being just another tool that the cellphone offered you, SMS has now become a tidal wave that8217;s swept aside everything in its path.

Agreed, it makes short work of the long telephone call, but perhaps it8217;s time to ponder awhile on the short shrift that Short Message Servicing makes of our language. With length being a problem, brevity8217;s the name of the game. It is only natural then that would and could, words that aren8217;t too long, become wud and cud.

Going is gng, am is m and maybe becomes mebbe 8212; despite both words having the same number of alphabets! What is the somewhat sillier wot, and if you want to ask someone what8217;s up, wassup will do. Or mebbe watsup? Get 8216;d8217; message?

There8217;s more. Apostrophes are now redundant: it8217;s dont, not don8217;t, wouldn8217;t gives way to wudnt and saying that you didn8217;t do it has gotten easier. For you just 8216;dint8217; do it. Anyways, to get back to the subject had v bin SMSng, that shud hv rd neways, keepers of the language must be turning in their graves. Again and again.

It8217;s cause for concern certainly. For the new language has simply taken over, it has forced us to make changes like never before. You8217;re communicating in English but it8217;s a brand new language. A shorter one. For instance, how many times do you write 8216;Hi, how r u?8217; when sending off an email?

There8217;s no harm, of course. Except when the convenience of this particular form of shorthand becomes a habit that you can8217;t break. When writing 8216;are8217; and 8216;become8217; seems too long, when you can8217;t remember when btw didn8217;t mean 8216;by the way8217;. And when kids pick up this language and spellings go haywire. After all, it8217;s now become a language that8217;s understood the world over. In a few days, perhaps, we8217;ll forget that c is see, be is b, u is you. That8217;s the pity.

Even that old maxim 8212; get your spellings right 8212; doesn8217;t apply. Like Mark Twain, you can get creative: spell your words in different ways. So tomorrow can either be tom or tmrw or 2mrw. Different strokes for different folks?

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And yet, stories abound about terse messages creating confusion. For say what you will, the msg8217;s loud 8217;n clear: Mebbe its tme 2 mnd r lnguage.