It’s been a while, but I shall make no excuses – I’ve been reading about 10x more than usual, leaving very little time for any writing, and well, my academic writing takes priority when push comes to shove.

Anyway, I’ve come across this wonderful article from the BBC. I must say that since I’m a technocrat, a futurist, and a science-fiction lover myself, in principle I agree with Asimov’s laws. Even more so since those laws are quite minimal – they simply protect people and robots (in that order). They do not implement a higher order of ethics, which eventually would be bound to result in something as ridiculous as human laws. And by ridiculous I mean any and all cases where discrepancies between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law exist (also known as the law vs justice debate), or situations where the judicial system is used/abused to pass judgment in cases which are the responsibility of the legislative arm of the government.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the long lost art of writing [part 1] [part 2] – or the problems with grammar kids and adolescents face nowadays. In case you missed it and don’t feel like rereading, my conclusion was that basically the end justifies the means in this case – language is organic and it how it should be used depends on the situation.

That was a few weeks ago, and since then I’ve been (proudly) accused of mild liberalism, which for many of my friends and readers was a bit of a surprise considering that my views on literature at large are rather traditional. However, then I came across this article and my blood almost boiled.

Apologies for the unforeseen delay, I was forced to combat a cold before resuming the battle with grammar…

In my first post I laid out the basics of what I’ll call the organics of language. I’ve also indicated a possible danger of rendering the English language poor by having most of its speakers use a limited vocabulary. Today I’d like to continue and perhaps conclude both ideas.

Before going further, a “generational” disclaimer should follow. A lot of comments seen these days on blogs that deal with writing extensively are of the type: “stop annoying people with something as dated as spelling rules”, “people have better things to do”, “this is so not from our generation”, “who cares how i write when i im me friends”, etc. There is a sort of stigma attached to grammar and spelling that makes them seem out-of-fashion, not cool. Now, that’s quite important as peer pressure applies in many ways and nobody will willingly make a fool out of himself/herself for the sake of grammar or spelling.

There is a fundamental (and perhaps ethical in this particular case) difference between stating “to jack off the horse” and “[To Jack]: Off the horse!”, or “(…)to Jack, off the horse”. Let’s remember that meaning is organic and whereas context can provide valuable information, it is not always sufficient. On the other hand, adhering to punctuation for its own sake, for the sake of glorification of one of the many style guides, or to simply be the proverbial pain in the arse; well, this approach also has its drawbacks.

Interestingly, both, the use of proper English, and the use of colloquial IM English have changed over the years. In the early days of BBSing, it was considered elite (or l33t) to interchange letters or words with similar numbers or even better, extended ASCII & ANSI characters). Some changes have made their way into common usage, such as ‘2′ for ‘to’, ‘4′ for ‘four’, ‘l8r’ for ‘later’. Certain expressions are reserved for online use only and are not commonly known to off-line users or older generations – here we have ‘lol’, ‘rofl’, ‘lmao’, ‘brb’, etc. I’ve heard a person use ‘lol’ in verbal communication this weekend and I must say that it was hilarious…

I have read Ed Bott’s fantastic article on Windows & WGA from this morning and almost exploded. What? How on Earth could something like this be legally possible to undertake? Shouldn’t this be the proverbial last drop before we see a massive migration to one of the Linux distros? We see stories about surviving without Windows pop up left and right; hell, this morning there was something about Linux becoming mandatory in Korea. And yet we cling on. Still, my intent is to analyze this move, not bash at it mindlessly (which may be the more appropriate thing to do).
1. WGA is poorly written. Months after it’s been released its code is still in Beta stage. I can think of countless times when I encountered problems because of the WGA mayhem. I’ve had it give me problems on an Advanced Server 2003, insisting that my copy of the server was not genuine, and although a call to MS resolved the issue, I was still forced to restore the fileserver to an earlier date, which was a nightmare considering that it also acts as my primary domain controller.