Sif totes not slang?

For most of my life, I have actively disliked American English. That’s right, actively. Not passively. Actively.

I used to think that the changes such as “color” instead of “colour” were blasphemous, and laughed at the pronunciation and spelling of aluminum instead of aluminium.

Even as I type this, both “colour” and “aluminium” are both underlined with squiggly red. Damn you Microsoft word!

Let’s see if I can manage to get an entire sentence underlined:

“Colouring the doughnut was focussed on in the dialogue programme that evening, although nobody had bothered to catalogue the faeces or diarrhoea of a foetus. Although somebody had modelled the effects of globalisation and fibre on an ageing population.”

Leaving aside the nonsensicality of it, the following words are underlined with that darned red squiggly line:

·      Colouring (Coloring) American English (AE) often changes “our” words to “or”. E.g. Flavour/flavor; harbor/harbor.

·      Focussed; Modelled – (Focused Modeled) AE often leaves out double letters no verbs when adding “ed”, “ing”, “er” or “est”. E.g. Cancelled/canceled; labelled/labeled.

·      Programme – (Program) AE often leaves out the “me” in programme.

·      Faeces; Foetus; Diarrhoea – (Feces; Fetus; Diarrhea) AE often changes “ae” or “oe” words to “e”.

·      Globalisation – (Globalization) AE often changes “ise” words to “ize”.

·      Fibre – (Fiber) AE often changes words ending in “re” to “er”. E.g. Theatre/theater; centre/center.

Interestingly, the following words were not underlined:

·      Doughnut (often spelled “donut” in AE)

·      Dialogue; catalogue (Often “ogue” words are shortened to “og”)

·      Ageing (AE often drops words ending with “e” when adding “ing”)

As you can see, American English frequently involves dropping letters.

Oh what’s that, you don’t actually need that extra letter in there? Well, heck, why was it even there to begin with? BE GONE VILE LETTER!

A younger, more naïve me once believed this practice reflects the Americans’ laziness. While that may be true, now I believe that this kind of practice is more efficient, and therefore is the way of the future.

After all, why bother aimlessly maintaining something that serves no practical purpose, other than to waste our fingers’ time in typing or writing? We are holding ourselves back, people!

Think of all the time you’ve wasted in your precious life typing and writing out those extra letters! Imagine if you could reclaim that time! Just think! You might regain a whole 3 minutes! You could listen to a song in that time!

This got me thinking about other inefficiencies in our language. Many older folk scoff at the language of youth, with their “el-oh-el” and “bee-ar-bee”. A friend of mine once accidently said “totes” during question time in a formal presentation setting. (For those who are unaware, “totes” is an abbreviation for “totally”.)

But when you think about it, why do we have words that can be shortened? Why is our language not already utilising (or utilizing?) the shortest possible forms of words to make for the most efficient language?

Some examples:

·      Perf (perfect) –E.g. “that is perf(ect)” or “you are perf(ect)ion”.

·      Deets (details) – E.g. “give me the deets”.

·      Totes (totally) – E.g. “I was totes under water”.

Why are these words – perf; deet; totes – not already words (and I’m fairly sure they are not)? Why do we not already use that combination of letter to describe something else? WE ARE WASTING OUR TIME WITH EXTRA SYLLABLES!

Now, I’m not suggesting we all start speaking like text messages. But I do find it interesting that a language which has evolved for so many centuries, and taken the best parts from other languages, still has such inefficiencies.

It’s not hard to see why inefficiencies in language are bad. Being able to express one’s self quickly and succinctly is useful (and sometimes crucial) in a variety of situations. So perhaps American English is just attempting to eradicate such efficiencies in language.

For example, simplified Chinese characters, as opposed traditional characters, take on some remarkable time-saving changes. Some of my favourites are:

Traditional	Simplified	English meaning
籲	吁	To call
鸞	鸾	Phoenix
鬱	郁	Dense
麤	粗	Coarse
龢	和	And
辦	办	To do/manage
邊	边	Side

As you can see, some traditional characters are significantly more difficult and time-consuming to write out than their simplified counterparts, saving even more time that dropping the occasional “u” or “o”.

Some advocates for traditional characters argue that the traditional versions maintain their original meanings. For example, the simplified character for love “爱”（traditional愛）replaces the character for heart “心”with the character for friend “友”. Perhaps the same will happen to English, as we move to a more abbreviated language we will lose the original meanings of words.

What do you think? Are slang words and abbreviations an improvement on our language? Or are they abhorrent?

“Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.” – Carl Sandburg

the reckless philosopher