Don’t LOL, the kids can still spell: Renzetti

Elizabeth Renzetti on the state of kids spelling and the evolution of language:

“Healthy languages change,” Mr. Shea said. “Dead languages are static.”

The linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker also delivers a liberating smack on the nose to pedants and doomsayers in his recent book, The Sense of Style. “The problem with the Internet-is-making-us-illiterate theory, of course, is that bad prose has burdened readers in every era,” he writes. Television and radio were once blamed for a decline in writing skills; now, it’s texts and Twitter. But, as he argues, college students are actually writing more these days than ever before, and they do not make more mistakes than their predecessors or “sprinkle their papers with smileys.”

Instead of seeing a degradation brought about by technology, Mr. Pinker identifies a long-existing division between bad prose, which is bloated, rule-obsessed and obscure, and good prose, which is vibrant, direct and clear. And he banishes treasured notions, such as the idea you can’t start a sentence with a conjunction, to grammar’s slagheap. To deftly split an infinitive is accepted. Prepositions can be placed anywhere they want to cling to. (The rules around prepositions and other parts of speech, Mr. Pinker demonstrates, have more to do with centuries-old fashion than clarity or common sense.)

In other words, language is its own thing, shifting and transforming before our eyes, as much the possession of teenagers as the people who grew up on Strunk and White. “When it comes to correct English, there’s no one in charge,” Mr. Pinker writes. “The lunatics are running the asylum.” And that’s how it should be.

Don’t LOL, the kids can still spell – The Globe and Mail.