Throughout the course of history,
language has steadily devolved from the formal and complex to less formal and
far less complex. Take Shakespeare, for instance; the language used in his
plays is some of the most complex language in literature with his use of long
soliloquies, complex metaphors and syntax. Most people today could not hope to
understand his writing without copious amounts of effort. Even a few hundred
years later, as Neil Postman points out in Amusing
Ourselves to Death, future president Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas
participated in elaborate debates containing complex syntax by each orator.
Most people today do not care for reading Shakespeare, or listening to a debate
lasting several hours, but in the days of the past, Shakespeare’s plays and the
Lincoln-Douglas debates were popular and well-received. So what accounts for
the change? Why do most people today only care for simple, concise uses of
language?
The
answer lies in the transformation of technology from the past few hundred
years. As Postman also points out, the use of the telegraph started a new
pattern, a new form of media: the news of today. With the telegraph,
information could be sent to people nearly instantaneously from any distance,
making large amounts of information available to anyone. Eventually, as
technology progresses, even more information will become available, but then
arises the question: how is someone able to comprehend so much more
information? Language, the medium through which thought is exchanged, must
become more concise.
The
recent presidential debate for the Republican Party is prime example of
language’s devolution. The debate between ten candidates lasted less than two
hours, and the candidates certainly did not use complex language. However, even
stating the debate lasted less than two hours is generous; I suspect most
people (like me) did not watch the entire debate, or they may have even watched
a video on the news showing highlights of the debate. With the pace of life in
the 21st century, people do not have time to listen to a lengthy
debate like that between Lincoln and Douglas, and they most certainly would not
like to listen to language that requires too much analysis. There is too much
information available for people to focus on one event for a long amount of
time.
In
addition to politics, the language of today has devolved in our writing and
social interaction. In history class, it is often necessary to read letters
written in the past few hundred years. Those letters contain formal, complex
diction and grammatical structures. For instance, letters between John Smith
and Alexander Hamilton have deep insights to discuss political ideology. The
letters, even though they were only discussions between two people, are complex
because the speed at which letters were sent was slow as compared to text
messages today. In those days, a discussion between two people at a distance
was carefully thought out because there was more time to make a discussion one
of quality. However, with text messaging today, it is completely acceptable to
write short sentences that are not grammatically correct because of the
high-speed life we have in the information age. Why would one laboriously write
out the word ‘you’ when one can write ‘u’ if it gives one a few more seconds to
address all of the other information available to us today?
