Ok here’s how I like it. Plain and simple. Understandable, accessible and straight forward. No mess, no fluff. That is when it comes to talking or explanation. Artisticly there are exceptions of course, but I’ll touch on that later. I can’t stand reading things that are not straight forward, especially if I’m trying to learn from them. It just makes it all the more frustrating.
Here I’m going to talk about the people who go too fancy and the people who go the opposite way and be pissed at them both.
Fancies
From time to time you get these types in the papers, generally in guest columns or such like. More often they will be the ones writing the essays that you are expected to read as part of your courses of study at college or university. They can be in other places too.
They like to use big words, words that you have never seen before in your life, or a mixture of both that they seem to expect you to know what they mean.
Either that or they know that you don’t and like to mock you.
They think it makes them sound clever, they know these words that you don’t. You have to go find a dictionary and look it up, which just wastes your valuable time. You’ve already left your essay til last minute, you don’t need this joker taking up any more time.
It doesn’t make them sound clever or important. It makes them sound pretentious. It makes them sound like they think they are better than whoever is reading their work, or that they believe that anyone who does not understand them does not deserve to be reading their work. It makes me very much dislike them and not care for what they have to say. It makes me wonder why I am wasting my time reading their self loving garble and why should I care what they think. It makes me wonder if the only reason that their opinion is held in such high regard that it has been given to me as mandatory reading is because some fools have been tricked by the complicated words into thinking this guy must be really smart. You don’t fool me. You’re like the guy with the sports car and the small penis.
Whenever they use these difficult words, there is always a much simpler one that everyone knows and understands that would have got the point across just as well and a lot quicker. Just use that and be a friend to the world. Then go to your country club and drink your whisky before visiting the opera and critiquing it.
As Einstein said “If you can’t explain it to a twelve year old, you haven’t understood it yourself”.
It is great that the English language has lots of words that all mean the same thing. It can be fun to play with them. But it’s not necessary or helpful for people trying to learn from you.
Where it is a good idea to use is in places like Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch. How many ways can you say dead in three minutes? Comedy genius. Not pretentious, but fun.
Messers
Then on the other side of the spectrum are the people who seem bent on destroying our language. The sort of people that prompted Futurama to make the joke that in the future everyone says ‘aks’ instead of ‘ask’.
The people who instead of writing ‘boy’ they write: boi, boyee, boo
Or instead of ‘why’ they put: wai, wye, wayee
My word. See these people writing. It’s like hieroglyphics. Here’s an example I borrowed from Lamebook .
(A very funny site with a lot more example of this sort of mess.)
What does any of that mean? You actually have to translate it to get any sense, and even then you don’t quite get the whole message. I would be genuinely surprised if the other people who write like that could understand it.
Maybe they think it’s cool or creative. Maybe they think it’s rebelling against the system by not spelling things the way that they should.
Come on people, you can still rebel and communicate effectively at the same time. It’s not clever, it’s plain as day stupid. Stop it, you are killing our language. I don’t want to end up having to say ‘aks’ or ‘boi’ or ‘I laik yor hayur innit’. Oh yeah, stop speaking the way you write too. It’s the most annoying noise.
Conclusion
Now don’t get me wrong, I love the way our language has lots of words that mean the same thing and can be played around with and still be understood. It’s the best thing about it. It makes it an art form to be able to toy with it and still make sense. Shakespeare did it, Dickens did it, Yoda did it and it made geniuses of them.
At the moment, English is just behind Mandarin as the most spoken language on the planet, Spanish and Urdu close behind. If it is allowed to be ruined, we will never have the top spot. Our hopes of a sci-fi future will be ruined. English will never be referred to as Galactic Basic or even be joint top with Mandarin like in ‘Firefly’. We can’t let that happen. I don’t want to have to learn French when I already know the greatest language on the planet. Nay, the universe.
And for the love of Jiminy Cricket, stop adding ‘gate’ to the end of everything that goes wrong.
