I'm curious if this is actually computer literacy plummeting or if it's a wider population of students being expected to understand computers.
When I was in high school the vast majority of my peers understood how to bundle up a bunch of photos, documents, etc. into a zip file and e-mail them. This is because my peers were nerds, and we were excited about this new computer technology and eager to learn everything we could about it. There were no computer classes in high school. When we had high school science class, we were expected to draw pictures of our experiments (y'know, with a pencil, on paper) and fill out the lab report longhand. There was a large segment of the student body who had no idea what a file was, or how to turn a picture into one, let alone how to bundle it into a zip file.
It was a bit different in college, where we were expected to understand Excel and how to run a regression or graph some data. But then, that drew from a very different population than high school.
It's sorta like how SATs are dropping not because kids are getting stupider, but because a larger proportion of people who would never have been considered college-bound a generation ago are now expected to take the test.
I think vastly more people are reading and writing due to modern computer literacy, and I can't stand the way they are changing the meaning of words because they don't read books. It appears vocabulary is increasing, but people get their vocabulary from inadequate online dictionary entries and/or peers that don't read books either. So to me, because I grew up reading books, it's incredibly aggravating because it seems like a new and inferior language that grew out of ignorance.
I love the renaissance of language, the minting of new words and concepts, the remixing of our heritage words with new Unicode characters and the mashing of new syntax.
I see it as progress - which destroys meanings as much as liberating new meanings. A word becomes a poetic palimpsest of needlessly complex layers.
I am an engineer-type, I like concrete words with focused meanings, I failed English at school while excelling at the hard sciences. The loss of meaning disturbs me, but I value the gains, and I accept that new language requires freedom from old dictators.
There's definitely a mix of good and bad as language changes.
Losing the word "meme" to the colloquial definition is a loss and a massive disappointment to me, because I think the gene analogy is insightful. When I talk to people about memes-as-in-memetics they're bound to get confused or even disbelieve me that it had any other meaning.
I've been accused of man-splaining in situations where I am legitimately being helpful, am an authority on the subject, and have good intentions, so I kinda don't like that words contribution, personally.
Literally should mean literally, and only literally, because it's useless if it doesn't.
On the other hand, there were all sorts of weird and redundant words that existed in English that probably shouldn't. This probably isn't true, but the word "praxis" seems like it exists because someone important misspoke when trying to say "practice" and then insisted it was a word in itself.
My impression is that the effect the parent talks about is real, though. There is a lot of regression happening in the language even as people get more literate, and the echo chamber of the internet reinforces trends into more lasting changes.
My biggest gripe of all with anyone effecting change on language lies with the marketing-focused actors who think they're doing their job well when they:
1) Appropriate colloquialisms and push them into the mainstream where they have more staying power than they otherwise would.
2) Refuse to expose people to words they're not familiar with because it might not appeal to them. Ever consider some people might want to learn new words? That starts with exposure. Lowest common denominator advertising is a well-funded stupefying force.
3) Create new words and change meanings to suit their narrative/sales pitch. A recent example is an article CNN ran about a new alternative to vapes and cigarettes. What they described is actually just a different kind of vaporizer. It emits nicotine vapor. They're calling it something different to avoid the stigma that shallow media coverage of vaping created, and making the word more ambiguous and less useful as a result.
> Losing the word "meme" to the colloquial definition is a loss and a massive disappointment to me
I love "The Selfish Gene", but it make me happy that memes and virality are modern metaphors for chunks of thought transmitted by wet symbolic processors. I believe that children now bellyfeel the meanings which is fantastic, even if they don't know the exact sense.
> Literally should mean literally, and only literally
I think I used to agree, but now I just like to amuse myself (and sometimes others) by misusing it. I do the same with many other words (sophisticated, nice, proud, etc). I like the layers of meaning, and I love multiple connections, although I still don't like most poetry.
> 3) Create new words and change meanings to suit their narrative/sales pitch
This is a true evil: the defiling of words for commercial gain riles me.
The selfish gene is a great book. I read it when it was about 15 and it really resonated with me.
Except the last chapter about f$%#ing memes. Hated it. It was like taking the core idea of the book and providing a cumbersome over-extended metaphor about ideas. So the colloquial meme is just as bad because it constantly reminds me of the original shit-house idea.
Climbing Mount Improbable was good, but I can't rate Dawkins' later work. The Extended Phenotype I found impenetrable, and I've tried reading it a few times. The God stuff ... omg, just please stop shouting about your Daddy issues.
I blame modern business marketing practices on the erosion of meaning in language. Words are so overloaded and defined in ways to confuse consumers and skirt legalities that it makes many terms devoid of any useful meaning.
Er, the Romans spoke Latin, as well as read it and wrote it. It was their vulgar language (from "vulgus", Latin for "common people"). The first Latin Bible was called The Vulgate because it was written in then common tongue of Latin instead of Greek or Hebrew. Latin was the language of commerce and conquest for the Roman Empire, as English was for the British Empire. Lastly, every language is invented, no?
Speaking of precision. I think a big problem with modern use of English is that it has reduced precision.
What reduces precision?
1. Increased reliance on idioms to communicate. Idioms use analogies, and usually reduce precision. Our increasingly shared cultural context via the Internet means that more and more idioms are entering common use and (IMO) reducing the clarity of communication.
2. Reduced general vocabulary. We have more jargon than ever before, but regular writing is simpler than ever. Generally speaking, a reduced vocabulary means more concepts are "mapped" onto the same words (like "great," a highly over-mapped word.)
3. Irony and sarcasm are abused as argumentation tools. Mocking a point is commonly accepted as arguing against it. I believe this stems from acceptance of irony as a normal way of communicating (as opposed to using it mainly for humor). This also results in many words having two opposite meanings, a "true" one and an ironic one. (ofc this happened in the past too, see history of the word "egregious.")
4. Ease of publishing. People put less effort into writing today because the barriers are lower. Yes, there are still authors who put a lot of thought into their work, but the Internet is awash in poorly-chosen words and ill-thought-out language that frankly didn't exist in the past. Poor language has poor meaning, and this actually damages the trust people have with the written word.
Of course, this is just my personal thoughts... I don't have strong problems with modern language. I think your question about "inferior" is a good one because superior vs. inferior doesn't make sense without metrics for comparison. If the metric is personal appreciation, then superior vs inferior is just subjective. If the metric is density of information transfer, I suspect we've improved.
Many of your complaints are based on an incorrect assumption: That what people do is writing.
Of course it is writing in the sense of using the alphabet. But has everyone started to write books and essays? No. In fact, people write less than they used to because letters have been mostly replaced by other methods of communication.
What you think is horrible written English is actually normal spoken English, just output through letters rather than sounds. And spoken language doesn't look anything like well-formed grammatical writing that doesn't give your English teacher a heart attack.
> 1/2
I'm getting strong Sapir–Whorf vibes here. Language adapts to what people say, not vice versa.
> Increased reliance on idioms to communicate. Idioms use analogies
No, they don't. Idioms have a meaning that is divorced from their constituent parts. They have a similar role to words.
> Reduced general vocabulary. We have more jargon than ever before, but regular writing is simpler than ever. Generally speaking, a reduced vocabulary means more concepts are "mapped" onto the same words (like "great," a highly over-mapped word.)
That is simply not how language works.
> 3
I, too, am concerned about the recent invention of satire and polemics. I hereby Modestly Propose to eat everyone that uses these diabolical stylistic devices and feed the leftovers to the Irish.
I frequently write to my grandma, who is fairly well-educated, and her writing is technically good. It is, however, bad writing. It's a pattern I've noticed quite a lot with older people. They write perfectly-formed garbage. I think the amount of time people spend writing today is greater than at any time in history, and I think it shows.
That's my intuition. But I'd also note, your points (1, 3 for example) contradict eachother. You complain that writing is simple (2), but unclear (1), idiomatic, but jargon-laced.
My thinking is that modern writing is a sort of colourful digression from the Elements of Style. Irony, simplicity, and idiom seem like good ingredients for playful, powerful writing.
I don't believe that my points contradict each other. So I'm going to address that part of your post, to avoid any confusion. But I think the rest of your argument is great, I just want to explain myself a bit better.
For starters, simpler writing can indeed be more unclear (because it's less precise, as discussed). So "simpler, but unclear" isn't contradictory in that sense. In this case the lack of clarity comes from a mismatch in the shared understanding between the writer and the reader. The more "simple" a sentence, the easier it is to misunderstand (to a point, and with exceptions).
And with respect to idioms, I would say that "uses idioms" does not convey the same idea as "idiomatic." By "idioms" I refer to reasoning by a shared analogy. A random example is the idiom, "Like water off a duck's back." It conveys meaning by analogy. This is usually less precise than using a direct description ("He didn't seem to care at all.") Sort of a dumb example, but I hope it makes sense.
Finally, about jargon -- by definition jargon is not part of shared vocabulary outside of a certain field of expertise. I believe a lot of our most precise words, which previously were common usage, are now becoming jargon. This is fine for experts but it leaves non-experts with a paucity of words to express their ideas in novel domains.
(Once again, this is just my personal impressions, not based on studies or anything. So, don't take it too seriously!)
I see where you're coming from, but I think one way in which we diverge is in our ideas about what is valuable in language. I quite like inaccurate, loose formulations because they're playful - and I think writing is a form of play, as much as it's a tool to communicate with. In its place, evocative vagueness can be better than sharp clarity.
My feeling as to what distinguish good writing from bad is more that good writers say what they want. Bad writers say stuff they didn't mean to, say stuff that other people want (cliches), or say nothing at all (obscurity). So in my eyes, there's no distinguishing textual characteristic of good writing. For instance, while I generally agree with you on jargon, David Foster Wallace uses jargon in a way I really like, and think is pretty central to what makes his writing good.
Genre is important here. One's choice of language when playfully communicating with friends will be different than the language used to communicate in a legal brief or a scientific paper. We adapt our language to our audience and the occasion to communicate our ideas. Being thoughtful and considerate to our audience is important on all occasions.
Are you sure it's not just generational misunderstanding?
A lot of people describe dialogue from early movies in a similar way, just because it's difficult to understand. Especially the early noir stuff. They're speaking perfect English, but it might as well be a foreign language to most English speakers today.
Yes, but reading old books doesn't usually capture the old vernacular well. Even if written (professionally) with that intent (Mice and Men, Flowers for Algernon) movies and audio were generally more accurate, (even if exaggerated) in that they're not subject to interpretation.
The writing of an un-edited grandparent might be a more accurate account of this.
You might be right. I find a lot of old vernacular pretty objectionable on stylistic grounds - if I was going to describe it, I'd call it 'semi-colon heavy'. Lots of big, chunky sentences with curlicues. It's a hard style to like. Then again, Moby Dick is written in that style, and it's amazing. I think it's like beef wellington or lobster thermidor. It's amazing if it's done really well, but a mediocre one is horrible.
Claims like this have been made from older generations to the younger and about every language since recording began. They were once made in Latin about a degenerate bastardization that eventually became French. Naturally, the French have in turn become rather protective.
Speakers are entitled to "abuse" their language if they want to. It is theirs.
Of course. It's only natural for things to change, and it's only natural for people to talk about the changes.
I believe our language is almost like a living thing that we are stewards of. One of the ways we can help steward modern English is to discuss the good and the bad parts, and try to move the language toward the good, even just in our personal speech.
So don't take my comment as a criticism of the younger generation. It's a criticism of myself and my generation. I'm just talking about the language that's floating around all of us, right now, that we are all building together. And I want to make that language as "good" as it can be.
Not the OP, but will take a crack: A divergence from the acceptable usage of words makes comprehension difficult, and can cause miscommunications, especially where precision is required; which happens often in a business environment. Even in a misunderstanding of proper usage can severely change the intent behind the messaging, if most communication happens over text (Slack/Email etc.).
That being said... if I'm reading this correctly, its specific to communication in non-business settings, where I don't really care much about whats "proper".
This is a losing battle, btw. Every society seems to struggle with the problem of keeping purity in language and all of them seem to have failed in that effort. Europeans failed to keep Latin relevant. Indians failed to keep Sanskrit relevant. The common language that is well understood by a majority will always win. And trying to keep it pure by force, just makes it die in relevance.
Which is why, the fact that Oxford English Dictionary keeps adding new words to the English dictionary is one of the best indicators of the resilience of the English language.
I don't think impurity is what I'm complaining about. What I preferred was when most of the people defining written English by their usage were more of an elite. It's not about who those people were or how exactly they used language, just that they read a broad variety of published material and not just contemporary communications.
>Europeans failed to keep Latin relevant. Indians failed to keep Sanskrit relevant.
They kept the languages for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians kept hieroglyphics going even longer. We are able to maintain languages without any problems, if we just choose to.
How much time have we all wasted reading threads that consisted mostly of folks arguing past one another, because each participant misunderstood what the other was trying to say?
I used Usenet during the 1990s, and communication was much easier, because grammar usage was much more uniform(1)(2)
(1)Changes in the rules of grammar aren't the primary problem, IMHO. The problem is folks who don't follow any rules at all; rather, they simply string together word sequences that sound familiar.
(2)I sympathize with young folks today who don't have a good grasp of grammar. Most of my education came from reading newspapers and magazines, which still employed expert editors when I was growing up.
The Usenet population was more uniform. People argue past each other because they don't agree on the premises, not because language has become less clear.
When people look up and misunderstand the meaning of a word, they base their interpretation on what they already know. So they are likely not to absorb a new concept but only get a new way of saying an old one. That means that the redefined word is likely to be an inferior tool on average.
It's also the case that just losing the utility of something hurts, regardless of the merits of the replacement so it's subjectively inferior to someone like me - getting older and crankier, you know.
> I'm curious if this is actually computer literacy plummeting or if it's a wider population of students being expected to understand computers.
I don't think that's the reason. I did study with non-nerds and they had to deal with computers because they wanted music, or to read an article in the internet or print something with Word/Windows and install the printer drivers.
What changed now is that things are more "streamlined" and all the complexity is abstracted. Software companies have figured out that people struggled with files, so they removed them. This can make the average person less computer-literate since he doesn't have to learn much to be able to handle the computer.
Even fairly computer-savvy younger kids don't really use e-mail. I had 3 HS students in a D&D group a few years back (now they are finishing college), and they were fairly tech savvy (2 of them went on to major in CS). I setup a listserv for our group to coordinate schedule &c. The response was "I don't really check my e-mail, can we use FB messanger?"
I somewhat understand this gripe against email but the issue I have with everyone who hates email is that you then diverge into about a dozen other communication mediums no one can settle on, making the overhead of checking all points of contact and remembering where relevant information as a chore.
Because of that, I prefer email. I'm more than happy to pickup new technology and use it but I have no desire to do so if it's going to take more time to do something I already have little desire to do.
My current location literally has 8 communication mediums and its miserable to deal with. Then I send emails and people complain... it's like people enjoy wasting their time.
I think part of it is that mobile OSes have trained people to treat their computers like appliances. The way you do something is by getting an app that is tailor made to do that thing. There is no such thing as data, that can then be acted upon by different apps and services (I.e. files). What you have, instead, is Instagram, for taking pictures and sharing them with filters, and Pinterest for sharing random places on the internet, Notes for keeping documents, etc.
I think 1 striking manifestation of the loss of the concept of files is that if someone wants to share a Note from their iOS device, the most common way for them to do it is for them to likely take a screenshot of it and share that image.
Since conceptually a note is not a thing of its own, but rather a part of the Notes app, people rightly believe you cannot share it on its own, and so need to go with the all catching screenshot fallback.
few years older, same. But yes, I think that time were nearly everyone was a PC user was only a few years. (and I suspect it depends on country when exactly that was)
There are several layers in this problem. To be able to zip files like a pro is great, but maybe those people shouldn't be doing it when they can use bzip2, gzip or xz instead that perform better.
99% of the time who cares about the performance or the program. If I need to create a compressed archive of a bunch of files for some one off purpose I’ll use whatever is most obvious and easiest on whatever system I’m using.
Eh as a college professor something has changed, not just the population. My experiences parallel the GP. I noticed it first with filename conventions; it rapidly changed from there.
This is in the same population of students. I noticed basically that IO tasks were eating up an increasingly big fraction of effort and time early on in courses, reflecting problems that didn't exist previously.
This seems to be for the reasons stated, that file IO stuff is being abstracted away. What used to be typical necessary computer fluency is now "low level" for many.
When I was in high school the vast majority of my peers understood how to bundle up a bunch of photos, documents, etc. into a zip file and e-mail them. This is because my peers were nerds, and we were excited about this new computer technology and eager to learn everything we could about it. There were no computer classes in high school. When we had high school science class, we were expected to draw pictures of our experiments (y'know, with a pencil, on paper) and fill out the lab report longhand. There was a large segment of the student body who had no idea what a file was, or how to turn a picture into one, let alone how to bundle it into a zip file.
It was a bit different in college, where we were expected to understand Excel and how to run a regression or graph some data. But then, that drew from a very different population than high school.
It's sorta like how SATs are dropping not because kids are getting stupider, but because a larger proportion of people who would never have been considered college-bound a generation ago are now expected to take the test.