Like everything else these days, we learned about it through Twitter. The gavel came down March 18, and the official account of the AP Stylebook announced: ""Language evolves. Today we change AP style from e-mail to email, no hyphen. Our editors will announce it at #ACES2011 today.""
There's a whole world of insight packed into those 123 characters—not the least of which is why the ultimate authority on grammar for English-speaking journalists worldwide thought it unnecessary to use one of its remaining 17 characters to put a space between the first two sentences.
But the hastily combined sentences are also symbolic of the greater effect Twitter has had on our language, which is to say, it's a whole lot faster.
Media types like to cite Twitter as one of the main reasons why journalism as an industry is dying. Social media venues provide faster and easier access to news you would otherwise have had to wait to read until the neighbor boy dropped off the early edition on your doorstep. And in this case, you found out about the new format for referring to electronic mail before those who witnessed its announcement at #ACES2011. Twitter moves lightning-bolt fast—so fast that you were more likely to know what was going on over the past month's Capitol protests if you kept tabs online than if you were embroiled in the rotunda.
Twitter's speed is essential to its usefulness, but this is true of the Internet as a whole. You don't have to be on Twitter to read the news, although it is useful if you are trying to read The New York Times for free. But the added fold to Twitter is that it has changed the manner in which we operate with language. One-hundred and forty characters is hardly enough for me to order lunch with, but that's the boundary alotted for each of our most pertinent thoughts—forcing us into some awkward situations. You don't have to hate Gov. Scott Walker's politics to hate the sorts of affronts to language he commits on his Twitter account every single day. And don't even get me started on hashtag rapping.
But this is nothing new. Newspaper editors are notorious for pinching words to fit into their limited space. Their rules save space, promote parsimonious language and let me write this list with one fewer comma. But most of all, this is the result of a language defined by its users.
Just last year the AP Stylebook changed the form from ""Web site"" to ""website,"" and certainly there are people who can't comprehend why the ""hyphen drop heard round the world"" does not apply to e-commerce, e-book, e-reader or e-business. But the answer is simple: none of those are as popular. When we can universally infer a word without the extra character, it is standard procedure to do away with it. AP style changed website and email to conform to humankind's elevated cognitive familiarity, and likewise it should make the change to lower-case Internet just as soon as someone can prove that there can only be one.
The evolution of language is a fundamental quality of English, and a better sense of this can be gained by looking at the Oxford English Dictionary's latest additions: LOL, OMG and FYI. On the surface, this looks like nothing but a sweeping reform catering to society's illiterates—but keep in mind that these were created by the same demographic that probably had to teach its parents how to navigate websites or read emails in the first place. And then consider how stuck-up English speakers probably felt when we suddenly allowed people to write ""you have"" instead of ""thou hath.""
We make changes to promote usage that is more casual and more streamlined without sacrificing clarity. And maybe that means anyone who requires a 732-word column to address the question of language's evolution is a pedantic and archaic nimrod.
But I don't get to make the rules, I'm just operating from within them. The AP Stylebook adapted to the world changing around it, and if any of us have a problem with the way it looks, maybe it's better we take a look at the world around us and figure out who the enemy really is. And then pray we never live in a world that adopts the lingual tics of @GovWalker's Twitter feed.
Kyle Sparks is a senior majoring in psychology and political science. Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
