The English language should be expanded to accommodate new forms of language use, not compressed

Thank you for including that video. It was rather interesting to get another perspective on the matter. That being said, I'm not sure why I'm debating against a TED talker here. --- "As you can see, it is texting that has changed how we communicate, not by expansion, but by condensation." I'm not going to argue with you on that one, but that's not what we are here to discuss. Whether it is a change that should be happening is far more pertinent to our debate here. Language, as our primary form of communication, is of vital importance to the spreading and discussion of ideas. As new ideas form, new words must be created in order to allow them to be discussed with greater ease. To take a recent example, the verb 'google' made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006 (1)(2). While the term began as a mere company name, the presence of he search engine in everyday life necessitated that a term be developed to refer to the act. This was a natural forming of language by society, but that us not always the way language changes. Let's take another example. In 1877 the word 'symbiosis' entered the English language (3) to describe a state in which multiple life forms are co-dependent. The word may have found it's origins in other languages, but it did not have precisely the same meaning or intended usage. Hence, we can reasonably say that it was a new word used by scientists to explore a newly discovered phenomenon. "With a few exceptions, we are perfectly able to express all ideas freely." Would the people of 1877 have been able to predict that one day we would need a verb like 'google' to carry out conversations? Would early biologists have considered that they might need a word to describe a phenomenon that they did not know existed? These words originated with ideas, and make it possible to discuss those ideas succinctly, so that our scientific journals aren't cluttered with sentences like 'the organisms were living in a state in which each was dependent on the other to survive' where the phrase 'the organisms were symbiotic' would do. And that only leads to derivations, like 'symbiotically'. If the word 'symbiosis' had never taken off, then instead of saying 'they were connected symbiotically' we would be forced to say something along the lines of 'they were connected by the fact that they both relied on each other to survive'. Just think how much worse deforestation would be if scientists didn't have words like symbiosis. And think how long our textbooks would be. So how is this all relevant to the way that we make language evolve? Surely if the words spring from the ideas we should not have to have a conscious input. As I have already pointed out in my last argument, there are quite a few words that do not have any English equivalent. There, right there, are words that exist to help us discuss ideas that clearly already exist, and all we have to do is add them to our dictionary. So this is a pretty decent reason that language expansion is a good thing. Let's take a look at how the txt spk phenomenon is butchering our language. Let us take the word 'egregious'. This word began its life meaning something 'outstandingly good', but has since picked up the second meaning 'extraordinarily bad'. This change in usage stemmed from the word being used outside its intended context, and as a result, it has no remaining practical meaning. To take an example from the video you provided, the word 'slash' is being given a new meaning by the texting phenomenon. But what about the old meaning? Adapting a word to a new meaning diminishes the meaning it can have in either context, and as we I have discussed above, we need out words. 'Lol', with its many emerging definitions, faces the same dangers. Now I would like to take a moment to refute the ridiculous claim that we do not use grammar as we speak. Grammar is, in fact, designed to mimic the way that we speak. I can't say that heavy literary writing is an exact rendition of our spoken language, but English did not begin as a literary language, so there must be more to punctuation than that. At the risk of drawing on an old example, let me draw your attention to the phrase 'let's eat, Grandma'. Were you to say this allowed, you would undoubtedly leave a small pause between 'let's eat' and 'Grandma'. It's the way that we have of verbally distinguishing the phrase from 'let's eat Grandma'. The comma in the sentence is merely a visual representation of that pause. This use of punctuation to recognise intonation and pauses is widely recognised, even to the point of campaigning for the introduction of a sarcasm mark. This only goes to show that adding punctuation can only expand the ease with which we communicate in the written form. So, clearly adding new words and punctuation is a positive step for the English language, and definitely to be preferred to allowing ourselves to slip into a perilous, txt-ified world in which nothing absolutely means anything anymore. No, unless we want every conversation to start sounding like Finnegan's Wake, the degeneration of language must be stopped. --- http://oxforddictionaries.com... http://searchenginewatch.com... http://www.etymonline.com... http://dictionary.reference.com... http://www.telegraph.co.uk...