So while the growing jargon brought on by online discourse may be degrading the grammatical rules of writing (some might argue with no loss to semantic content), the growing population that is now reading and writing and becoming more literate than would have been else wise is worth the expense. IMHO.
In a message dated Tue, 10 Apr 2001 11:12:09 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Geoffrey Sampson <geoffs@cogs.susx.ac.uk> writes:
<<
The trouble with Steven Krauwer's suggestion that there is a valid type
of e-mail which is like "chat" and should properly not be subjected to
greater quality control than social chat is that the receivers have no
way of rationing their exposure. Of course social chat with family,
friends, and work colleagues has an important role in life; it is time-
consuming, but we can ration our involvement because it is a face to face
activity, understood to be more appropriate in some settings than others,
and so forth. On the other hand, many of us spend most of our working
lives these days at a computer terminal and we have no way of limiting the
range of people who send us e-mails. If someone had time to spend just
"chatting" when they were nominally at work, it seems to me they would be
rather under-employed. I believe there are special electronic facilities
provided ("Internet Relay Chat"?) for people who want to spend their time
that way. I continue to feel that people who send e-mail to other
people's workplace addresses are under a duty to apply the same sort of
quality control to their messages as they would to letters or inter-office
memos on paper.
An exception, I do recognize, would be when a particular pair of correspondents
had established a mutual relationship which might involve chatty messages
-- then it's obviously up to them how they choose to communicate with
each other. But the sloppiness in e-mails which Ramesh Krishnamurthy
alluded to and I took up in response to his message is not, in my experience,
confined to that sort of scenario. It often occurs in messages from
complete strangers. That does seem to me to be a subtle kind of selfishness.
Geoffrey Sampson
G.R. Sampson, Professor of Natural Language Computing
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, GB
e-mail geoffs@cogs.susx.ac.uk
tel. +44 1273 678525
fax +44 1273 671320
web http://www.grsampson.net
>>
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