Writing without Spaces

Last October I wrote,

Now, interestingly, in this age of the Internet we are back to where we were three or four thousand years ago [that is, in the history of writing, before spaces or some other marker of word division was invented and words and even sentences were simply run together]. Web site addresses (URLs), email addresses, and screen names often run words together. This occasionally makes for interesting possibilities to misread, but it almost always means we're having to learn to read writing that once again doesn't use spaces—thus going back thousands of years in the history of writing.

Now a friend has sent me some humorous examples of the problems I had in mind when I wrote that.

All of these are companies that didn't spend quite enough time considering how their online names might appear - and be misread:

1. Who Represents is where you can find the name of the agent that represents any celebrity. Their Web site is
www.whorepresents.com/

2. Experts Exchange is a knowledge base where programmers can exchange Advice and views at
www.expertsexchange.com/

3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at
www.penisland.net/

4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at
www.therapistfinder.com/

5. There's the Italian Power Generator company,
www.powergenitalia.com/

6. And don't forget the Mole Station Native Nursery in New South Wales,
www.molestationnursery.com/

7. If you're looking for IP computer software, there's always
www.ipanywhere.com/

8. The First Cumming Methodist Church Web site is
www.cummingfirst.com/

9. And the designers at Speed of Art await you at their wacky Web site,
www.speedofart.com/

I tested a couple of these links and they all appear to be genuine web sites.

Is This Progress?

This is about three instances of "progress" recently made in our rapidly evolving world—that don't look like progress to me at all.

Writing was invented a hundred years or so before 3000 BC. It took another thousand or two thousand years before someone had the clever idea to somehow mark where one word ended and another began, and/or where one sentence ended and another began. Before that, everything was run together. With the new invention of the separations, writing became easier to read.

Now, interestingly, in this age of the Internet we are back to where we were three or four thousand years ago. Web site addresses (URLs), email addresses, and screen names often run words together. This occasionally makes for interesting possibilities to misread, but it almost always means we're having to learn to read writing that once again doesn't use spaces—thus going back thousands of years in the history of writing.

I remember when I was very young. During World War II no cars were being manufactured, so shortly after the war my family still owned a pre-war car, a LaSalle. To start that car, you pressed a button. Then at some point, a car's starter was activated by turning the key. That seemed like a good advance. Now, however, cars once again are "featuring" a button to start them. I don't see that this is an advance and can't see a reason for this—other than to imitate the hybrid cars which have a start button.

Another interesting trend is that now a lot of men's underwear is made without flies.
Frankly, I think flies are a good thing. Maybe I need not, or should not, go into detail on this one. I'll just call it another instance of very dubious "progress."

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

The Dumbing (Down) of America

The TV news weather segment includes a "future cast"; what do the producers think the fore- in forecast means?

The TV weather also now speaks of "rain chance" instead of "precipitation probability"—which I guess is too big a word for people to deal with. Also, the heat index is now called "feels-like" temperature. Less brains are required to grasp that, I'm sure.

Another personage on TV, who hosts travel shows, usually does not say, for example, "eighteenth century" but "the seventeen hundreds." Again, I guess that they are assuming a pretty low level of public intelligence.

I just bought a new supply of mouthwash. The previous bottle was called "antiseptic oral rinse," but this one (same product, new label) is "antiseptic mouth rinse." Some marketing exec figures we are all too dumb to know the word oral. Jeez!

And objectively, we in America are getting dumber. Test scores keep falling. Students do not learn to read and write (and spell!) in grade school and are passed on to high school. They do not learn to read and write in high school and are passed on to college. Are they taught to read and write in college? Maybe the colleges try—I for one have taught "developmental" (what we used to call "remedial") reading to college students. But, of course these students should have learned much earlier, and it is a disgrace that it should fall to colleges to make a last-ditch effort to teach what are elementary-school skills.

And many colleges—scandalously—have very lax standards for admission and for graduation, and they will confer degrees on these students—who still can barely read and write!

We keep hearing that what is at risk is America's ability to "compete." I am sure that students in those countries which we fear as competitors—Japan, China, Taiwan, even India—can do a much better job of reading and writing their own languages, even though students in Japan—and even more so in China—have to learn a writing system with far more characters than English has.

I think I have given some of my ideas on what is wrong with American education in another blog posting. Here I will simply say that, when we have very low expectations for the intelligence and knowledge on the part of the public, as we seem to, those expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein

Americans Can't Spell Anymore

Nowadays, people's competence in English spelling is very poor, at least to judge from what I see people writing in online chat rooms and so forth. No one knows the difference between your and you're. There's also ignorance of the differences among to/too/two, there/their/they're, and even then/than. Hardly anyone, anymore, respects the distinction between it's and its. (This problem, or mistake, has become well-nigh universal.)

Some of these things are not new. I very well remember, when I was teaching college freshman English, some 40 years ago, writing (over and over and over) on student themes, "It's = it is." And it seems no one knows, anymore, how to spell a plural possessive (no, it's not the same as the singular possessive).

To my mind, the blame for this situation rests squarely with teachers. Decades ago (but after I was in school), teachers adopted a philosophy of allowing students to write with no correction or criticism of "mechanics" by the teachers—because it was thought that requiring students to pay attention to mechanics would distract them from expressing themselves and stifle their creativity.

This is part of a larger phenomenon of what is wrong with education. Teachers (and "educationists," those educators with Ed.D. degrees) want to turn all learning into a game and have enormous dread, and avoidance, of ever having to tell their pupils that something must simply be learned by applying a little effort. All out of (to my mind) an exaggerated fear of stifling the kids' fragile little psyches. Maybe this is why, according to many measures, America's kids can't keep up with those in some other countries.

However, if everybody begins to write your when they mean you are, I don't really believe that will mean the end of the world is upon us. Because of my linguistic training, I know that orthography (spelling) is arbitrary, to a degree--with English orthography being more arbitrary than that of many other languages. To spell or write homonyms the same or differently is not going to matter a great deal—unless maybe you want to worry about whether, at some future time, people won't be able to read older literature anymore. Maybe today's authors will be as hard to read, in the future, as Chaucer or even Shakespeare is for us today.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein

A Word to Writers

So far my postings on this blog have dealt with quite a few subjects—because I have opinions on nearly everything. However, I think it's time to turn attention to something that I truly am qualified to pontificate on, and that's writing—and maybe editing, too. However, I don't think I'm going to truck out my credentials.

First: Apparently we are all taught in school that, in writing that quotes one or more people, you don't keep repeating says. So-and-so says, this-and-that person says. Presumably this gets boring, so you have to vary the word used.

Well, maybe, but the attempts to avoid saying says get ludicrous. Okay, you see ". . . adds Jones," ". . . observes Smith," ". . . argues Wilson," and "Cynthia shares. . . ." But when it gets to "disagrees Carlson," and "excuses Johnson," it's getting silly. Or what about cautions, interprets, contradicts, predicts, shares, muses, opines, and jokes. I hate shares. Some of those others might be all right, but don't use jokes unless you are sure the person meant to be joking or said what he said in a joking tone; and similarly for predicts, muses, and so forth. I think that's part of my objection, that the writer is attributing an intention to the speaker that may not be there.

While I suspect that the inverted thing ("shares Cynthia") somehow violates grammaticality, at the very least they sound very odd, even wrong; and these writers' ears should tell them so.

So many of the dicta that we were indoctrinated with in school—not the least "Don't repeat says"—at best are not to be over-broadly applied and at worst are out-and-out wrong.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein

School Days, circa 1950

It seems like every kid in America these days rides a schoolbus to school. That wasn't always the case, of course. My grandfather used to tell us how he had to walk to school--with holes in his shoes, and uphill both ways. And I had to walk to school, too, at least when I missed the dinosaur.

Seriously, I did have to walk to school. We didn't have school buses. Back then only rural kids had school buses. So I walked, to elementary school and high school. During elementary school years, I walked to and fro, not only morning and afternoon, but to go home for lunch, too. There was no lunch served by the school, everyone had to go home for lunch. And my mother worked, so I was a latchkey kid before the term had been coined.

My elementary school was probably not much different from the ones my parents had attended. The classroom had a big, old-fashioned (even then) crank-up phonograph. I don't think it had one of those horns, though. When we learned to write, we used a pencil, until—I think it was in the third grade—we were grown up enough to make the big jump to INK!

In preparation for that big move, every kid had to make a pen wiper at home and bring it in to school. This was two small squares of cloth with a large button in the middle sewn through the two layers of cloth.

Once we made the move to ink, we were issued a long black wooden pen holder and a steel nib. Every student's desk had an inkwell in the top, and the teacher would mix up the ink in a tall glass bottle, and then come around to every desk and pour some ink into each kid's inkwell. Of course this came with all sorts of cautions to us kids, such as about not trying to take the inkwell out of the desk while it had ink in it. Supposedly the thing to do, as a prank, was to grab one of the long hair braids of the girl sitting in front of you and dip it into your inkwell; but I don't think anyone actually did that. Probably because girls weren't still wearing their hair in braids.
Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein