Mourning the English language

It’s hard to be an editor in the twenty-first century. The English language is dying a slow, painful death, and no one seems to care. What’s more, thanks to the proliferation of the BPO business model, the deadlines are tight and set on a 24-hour clock.

I work hard for next-to-no pay. When I started, I was okay with that because I was a trainee working in a country with a seriously undervalued currency. And when I became a freelancer, I couldn’t complain much because there were no other job offers coming, and I was living at home. But when you’re living alone and working day and night for dollars and cents, it often feels like it’s not worth the trouble. This feeling is compounded by clients who give you bad feedback, with no explanation of why they’re displeased, after you’ve put all your effort into making their barely intelligible document look like it was written by a native English speaker.

I don’t remember ever having an English grammar lesson in school. I guess I learned to write/speak properly by reading and by applying some of the rules of French grammar to my native language. I honestly don’t know. And I didn’t grow up in the computer age. We wrote everything by hand and got our information from books.

The information that is out there today is scary. The Internet has given absolutely anyone the opportunity to be an “author.” In fact, if you look at people’s profiles and resumes these days, they call themselves “authors” because they blog, or have blogged at some point. By that token, we must all be “subject matter experts” because we have opinions on things. Because all you need today are opinions, not facts. It’s an instant reaction now to google something when you want to know about it. See, Google has become such an important part of our lives that it has become acceptable to use the word as a verb! And the Internet is full of complete nonsense and unchecked information written by people like you and me.

Today, v r spsd 2 wryt lyk dis. It makes me cringe. This “language” first surfaced very innocently in text messages due to the lack of space: How R U? Soon, it developed, killing off vowels, compressing endless phrases into acronyms, negating punctuation marks, and substituting words with symbols or numbers wherever possible, all in order to save us time—not because we’re all so busy, but because we need to write the next text message, and the next, and the next... People actually have lots of time on their hands; they just don’t notice because they’re usually doing more than one thing at a time.

This is the “zero attention span” era, so who really cares about spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence construction? Sometimes I feel like it’s only me, which makes me as a professional editor kind of redundant.