But it's not grammar!

At The Language Feed is an article called btw, its tuff to communicate wit ur kid by Kelly Kazek in the Athens, Alabama, News Courier. It begins:

’s up, peeps.

nuttin much wit me just wanted to say hey cus im bored. btw did u c julies new haircut CUUUUTTTE!

k…im done L8R


If you can read that paragraph, you are either a National Security Agency code breaker, a Sanskrit translator or a 12-year-old girl.

When my nearly 13-year-old daughter e-mails or messages her friends, she doesn’t use any language I’ve ever seen.

It’s not that I am unworldly — I can count to at least eight in Spanish and order beignets in French.

It’s just that she refuses to be bound by the centuries-old rules of grammar to which the rest of the country is firmly tied.

And it continues with a fairly familiar rant about how kids these days are ignoring grammar all over the place.

Now, I don't know if I can blame Ms Kazek for calling what is clearly three paragraphs "that paragraph" - her editor or layout person may be to blame.

What I can blame her for is calling spelling grammar.

I mean, let's 'decode' that opening (which, by the way, is not that hard to do):

’s up, peeps. = What's up, people?

nuttin much wit me just wanted to say hey cus im bored. btw did u c julies new haircut CUUUUTTTE! = Nothing much with me. Just wanted to say "hey" because I'm bored. By the way, did you see Julie's new haircut? CUTE!

k…im done L8R = OK, I'm done. Later,

Now, with the possible exception of "cus" - a clipped form of "because" - there is nothing here that isn't merely a misspelled word or a use of slang (peeps). Not to denigrate the importance of spelling, but it's all conventional and artificial. (Plus, when Alfred Bester did it in The Demolished Man it was hailed, but then Bester was a brilliant novelist, not a 12-year-old girl.) In fact, I'm rather taken with that nuanced spelling of 's up, myself: the apostrophe clearly shows the girl knows there are missing letters - heck, a missing word!

It's not grammar. It's spelling and vocabulary. (And by the way, "centuries-old rules"? Of spelling? Hah! Of punctuation? Don't make me laugh... Just look at the way they spelled and punctuated in the 18th century.)

Here is the heart of the complaint:

I know Shannon’s teachers taught her that sentences end with periods. Just the other day, she told me, “I am not eating your Brussels-sprouts-and-tuna surprise. Period.”

I know she knows her capital letters. I remember working with her in kindergarten, tracing S’s over and over again.

According to her report cards, she can spell.

But somehow the rules of English have become uncool, unhip and mizundastud.

Kids no longer rebel against The Establishment or The Man. They have taken on the sanctity of The Correct Grammar.

Capitalization? Spelling? Punctuation? Of course those are important.

But.

It's not grammar. Grammar is the rules by which we make sense of the language. If the rules are chucked out the window - as Kazek claims they have been by an entire generation - then the resultant verbiage would be incomprehensible. Essentially, all Kazek's daughter is doing is engaging in orthographic reform, something pushed by many intellectuals around the English-speaking world for centuries.

She's not producing ungrammatical sentences. She doesn't say "Is people up what? I with much nothing." She just spells some of her words differently - I won't say misspells because not only are these conventionlized spellings in their proper register, but according to Kazek herself, her daughter knows how to spell them and chooses, in this venue, not to. Kazek complains that these habits are creeping into other venues, such as letters - clearly a hanging offence. (Or maybe a chance to explain register? The woman's an editor, after all...) But, regardless, spelling and punctuation are not "the rules of English".

Kazek's daughter is following all the rules of grammar. If she spoke that sentence aloud, her mother would find nothing wrong with it, except possibly to deplore the slang word "peeps".

Btw, Kazek ends her diatribe by listing the terrible things that will happen to "our" generation if this goes on™ - one of which is

We won’t be able to order fast food or see movies without subtitles.

Please. If, as I said, she heard her daughter speak that "language" she wouldn't be able to tell (assuming, of course, that the child doesn't pronounce L8R as "ell-eight-ar"). It's movies with subtitles - La science des rêves as Teh Science uv Sleep (u can c rl n 3d) - she needs to worry about.