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Millennials And Curmudgeons Both Need To Clean Up Their Grammar

The young and the old are both pretty terrible at communicating in the information age. We should change that.

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On the floor of the Senate, surrounded by elected officials and important digni­taries, an eccentric inventor started texting.

On May 24, 1844, with an elec­trical wire strung from DC to Baltimore, Samuel Morse trans­mitted the first telegraph, forever trans­forming the world. Reflecting on the divine prov­idence of this tech­no­logical leap forward, Morse tapped out a message of dashes and dots that read, “What hath God wrought?”

Now Kelly texts Becky, “OMG! Look at her butt!” and busi­nessmen email, “see attached,” squan­dering our great inher­itance with an incessant elec­troshock torture of the English language. Multigenerational murder, this linguistic abuse unites and indicts the young and the old.

Instead of sending snarky tweets across the generation gap, as some are wont to do, millennials and curmudgeons should stop squabbling. If commu­ni­cation makes man human, then these sloppy messages do more than just foster sloppy thought. They dehumanize us. And it’s the responsibility of all generations to politely proofread their use of language in the information age.

Email Abuse In Corporate America

The first and worst grammar abuse began, not from the bottom of society, but from the top of the corporate world in the corner office. Every day in every workplace, drones send and receive millions of emails. According to research by the McKinsey Global Institute, the average white-collar American worker spends almost 28 percent of the work week on email alone.

That’s 13 hours of chugging through messages about following up to touch base about squaring circles to bring everyone into the loop about a synergized idea that’s ulti­mately a non-starter.

This linguistic abuse unites and indicts the young and the old.

Stringing together these sweet corporate nothings doesn’t just jumble a message. It changes meaning. The email author loses control when he surrenders precision of diction for the ambiguity of clichés. Business profes­sionals descend to the intel­lectual capacity of chim­panzees selecting random phrases and keywords they recognize. The only thing worse than these obnox­iously opaque emails? The emotionless imperative.

Too often, curt and cold replies pass through our inboxes: “Sure,” “good enough,” “follow up when finished,” etc., ad nauseam. Without context, these one-liners force the recipient to infer, to fill in the missing context that a lazy author left out. Of course, deadlines dictate rapid-fire responses and streamlined commu­ni­cation. But these exceptions often become blanket excuses for blatant discourtesy.

Tired Of Millennial Discourtesy? Then Clean Up Your Own Act

During the height of the Second World War, even when barbarism threatened civi­lization, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt kept up a charming corre­spondence while discussing grand strategy.

But it’s cool. Like, your job’s really stressful and the modern workplace moves so fast that you don’t have time for that. You do you. Let everyone else worry about piecing together what your half-digested dribble really means. Or maybe you could act like a decent human being.

Not every email needs to paint a little masterpiece, but they all should be clear, concise, and at very least polite. Rather than complaining about “kids these days,” curmudgeons should download spell-check and expend some effort on infusing real meaning into emails. They could actually, you know, try to set an example.

All of that’s not to let millennials off the hook. Oh, no, we’re the worst. In fact, we welcomed our own communication corruption with thumbs wide open.

Kids These Days Are Bashing The Jaw of Language With Both Thumbs

Even less formal than email, text messaging has become the most prominent vehicle for linguistic manure. A 2013 study by Experian Marketing Group estimates that the average millennial sends a little more than 2,000 texts a month, or about 67 messages a day.

We pros­titute paren­theses, dashes, and semi-colons into an unholy matrimony that produces stillborn, sideways smilies.

With just two thumbs and a QWERTY keyboard, this generation has bashed in the jaw of the English language. Mainstays like grammar, proper syntax, and punc­tuation no longer apply. Instead, it’s fast and loose and ugly.

An undig­nified dictionary of acronyms and emoticons has tried to fill the void. To give emotion to our dribble, we pros­titute paren­theses, dashes, and semi-colons into an unholy matrimony that produces stillborn, sideways smilies.

Sure. Sometimes it’s necessary to send a quick text conveying important infor­mation. Texting is an amazing invention that even the Luddite would find useful. But it’s a sad world when texting replaces true conver­sation, and too often the convenient crowds out the communicative.

Had Romeo and Juliet swooned over text rather than under windows, Billy Shake­speare wouldn’t have had Juliet call out, “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” Instead, she’d type, “Romeo?! um, hello Romoe? Where u @…?”

Come Together, Right Now, Over Grammar

This abysmal state of language in email and texts isn’t a moral oversight. It’s a moral crisis. Writing inherently employs the intrinsically human faculties of speech and reason. Tech­nologies like email and texting can serve as modern catalysts for timeless commu­ni­cation, elevating the human condition by knitting indi­viduals together in community. But the inverse also is true.

Texts and emails can bankroll bankrupt ideas and poor practices. Only now, the human collateral is expo­nen­tially greater in proportion to technology’s ability to overcome space and time.

Looking back, will our children read through our love letters and discover our profes­sional triumphs? Will they sift through garbled texts and impersonal emails in desperate search of some greater meaning? Or, even worse, will they shake their heads as they discover how their bickering parents and grandparents made fools of themselves one email, tweet, and text at a time?

Every time we press send, we decide what God hath wrought, we influence whether advances in commu­ni­cation amount to a blessing or a curse. Emails and texts can elevate our language and humanity, or they can turn us into sentient beasts beating on keyboards and talking past one another.

Millennials and curmudgeons should work to save language. The choice is ours to make together.

Philip Wegmann is a Staff Writer and the Radio Producer for The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.