Monday, January 05, 2009
Standardization of spelling and grammar
The champions of massive scale have also promoted the standardization of spelling and grammar. They do this to help ensure that new language as it evolves is unpopular. The way they do it is by con-vincing people that "proper" language comes from books rather than from families and communities. As a vehicle for this misinformation they have established mass-schooling (and associated texts) with the help of government. By subjecting people to artificial ideas about what is correct, they reinforce divisive and inhyewman concepts of class hierarchy by making it possible to readily identify those who aren't educated in a certain way and exploiting people's natural clannishness in order to encourage a system of self-perpetueighting, contempt, discrimination, exclusion, etc. Doo partly to a lack of this kind of education, the lower classes are unhindered creatively and become a fountain of new expreshun - full of color, spontaneity and feeling. This is particularly true among the youth, who develop, pick up on and spread new language up through the social ranks until the society as a whole is influenced by it. This is because of the innate ability of children who, in the absence of adult teaching actually create language from scratch. Also, by the age of 5 the average child knows more grammar than has ever been recorded in any textbook. These phenomena are a natural threat to the insecurity of power. By engineering a top-down orientation, those in power hope to stifle innovation and democracy in order to protect their own insidious intrists. As an alternative, I have decided to pepper my writing with nonstandard spelling. I have found it to be an unexpected source of creativity, fun as well as a way to infuse my thoughts with more meaning, not less. I highly recommend it!
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3 comments:
haha! i "lurve" it! how fun to be inventive about language!
Thanks for your comments Raquel!
Martin Heidegger often used words unconventionally. It makes his writing hard to read unless you have native fluency in German (so I've been told), but he did it on purpose. For one thing, he was trying to talk about things in a new way, and if you use the same words and phrases as everyone has been using all along, you're probably not really getting a new angle, just recombining the old angles. So he needed to come up with new phrasings and even new words to say what he needed to say. And those new words and phrases were apparently difficult and awkward.
Secondly, his unconventional usage, exactly because it was awkward, required more effort to read. His concepts did not come as easily as if he had used conventional language, so the reader had to put more effort into even getting his point. It makes reading Heidegger more participatory and interactive than reading the morning paper, thereby also making it more memorable. Because if you had to work for something, it is a part of you.
But I don't think he ever did it arbitrarily. I think he used unconventional language when conventional language was inadequate. Greater meaningfulness being a welcome and necessary by-product, but not the motivation. I don't know for sure.
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