UPDATE (8/24): The battle is enjoined! Robert Hartwell Fiske calls his readers “to arms”! As it turns out, speaking good English allows you to beg for pocket change.
Choire Sicha at Gawker calls the Barrett-Fiske kerfluffle a cat fight. We’re frienemies, you might say. For the older set who don’t know that word frienemy, just think of the fake feud between Jack Benny and Fred Allen. (I’m Benny: he could make Groucho laugh.)
Angela Gunn at USA Today’s Tech_Space blog is havin mai seatz, readin mai mailz, because she thinks a fight about language is just the cure for a slow news month.
Gizmodo gives the Wall Street Journal a smack with a blackjack, too. Somebody gets called an alarmist idiot. Gizmodo’s take gets play here, here, and here, among other places.
This joker thinks the article is a sign somebody will start teaching l33t in the classrom.
They love me in Canada part zillion: Teacher Lady has my back.
Network Performance Daily takes a cynical view of the article, too: “In this hard hitting expose by the Wall Street Journal, arguably one of the pre-eminent business newspapers of the world, reporter Christopher Rhoads takes a hard look at a matter of vital importance to the world economy. Apparently, gamer’s shorthand, or ‘leetspeak’ is changing the way that human beings communicate.”
Below is my post that set off this limpest of tempests:
….
Since I spoke at length to the reporter who wrote it, I guess I should be relieved that I wasn’t quoted in this asinine story about online language, “What Did U $@y? Online Language Finds Its Voice,” in the Wall Street Journal. However, I would have preferred that Christopher Rhoads get it right, even if he didn’t quote me.
Comments in the article by my colleague Allan Metcalf are correct and were, no doubt, confirmed by the reporter in nearly identical comments that I made.
But let’s talk about the major problem points:
1. The lede: “TEh INTeRn3T i5 THr3@+EN1N9 t0 Ch@n93 thE W4Y wE $p34k. (Translation: The Internet is threatening to change the way we speak.)”
First, it’s the usual cliché: write a line or two in the supposed slang being discussed in the article, then translate it. Lazy journalists and copy desk editors have been using this hoary mechanism since at least the 1930s.
Second, nobody writes all in leet-speak except as a stunt or unless they are exceptionally clueless, both which, I guess, apply here.
Third, why is this a threat? Why is this a negative? The reporter doesn’t say. That sentence is what I call the “confirming cloud of doom”: it satisfies those who are uneasy with the progress of the world around them, while at the same time it offers no data that can be refuted. It’s editorializing in its purest form.
The rest of the article offers more of this: a few people talking from their gut about how everyone who speaks differently is an idiot.
2. “For years, heavy users of Internet games and chat groups have conversed in their own written language, often indecipherable to outsiders.”
Well, no. Studies of online chat corpora show that only about 20% of chat language is abbreviated or innovative, and of that 20%, nearly all of the uses are transparent, fairly standard abbreviations. The intent in using such language isn’t to obscure, it’s to move faster, so chatters gravitate towards language that is both clear and quick. When obfuscation occurs, it is usually later clarified through context and restatement.
4. “As the Internet becomes more prevalent, leetspeak, including acronyms that used to appear only in text messages like ‘LOL’ for laughing out loud, is finding a voice.”
There is sufficient evidence to suggest that the full form of leet-speak is little more than a historical curiosity mainly perpetuated by ignorant journalists and ironic Interwebbers who use it precisely because it’s stale and out of fashion, kind of like saying, “you bet your bippy” or “it’s the bee’s knees!”
Also, LOL isn’t leet-speak. It’s simply an acronym used online.
5. “The words’ growing offline popularity has stoked the ire of linguists, parents and others who denounce them as part of a broader debasement of the English language.”
This is wrong in at least three ways.
First,