Living Language: Autocorrect Poetry

Language slows us to communicate 
Without languageOur ideas would benefit mantillasAnd without our KawasakiAnd our through a And our ability to express themDo w werewolf have an identifying If we are unable to communicateIf we are unable to express If we are unable to articulate I'd we are unable to convey Our thigh Our beliefs Our ideasOur moralscodicilsAre we really able to be who we are?If the essential Thu. is that define us At winnable you be spoken And understood Are we really who we are?NoWe are notified 

Clearly, I am not the best texter, so this prompt suited me and quite frankly I thought it would be the funniest. Even writing the title to this blog post, my MacBook wanted to change "poetry" to something probably along the lines of "possum". Communication, now, is conveyed mainly through technology. Think about it, whens the last time you got a personal letter in the mail of any sort of substance (the letter from that same college you get every week doesn't count)? Now, we send emails, Facebook chats, and texts, among other things.  And with all of these, we deal with autocorrect. 

When phones first came out with the option, my friends and I would frequently stop and laugh at all the ridiculous things we would end up sending each other. I even call my best friend Nesty now because that’s what my first smartphone would always change her name to. But now, its such a commonality, that we find ourselves reading around the autocorrected ridiculousness and somehow our brains are able to, for the most part, still understand what is trying to be said without dwelling on the corrections. The idea that we can understand “gob” as “go” or “duck” as pretty much any word my phone feels should be duck, is quite telling. Although I don’t think this means we will necessarily begin to adopt these silly changes into our language, I do believe it changes the playing field for how we are able to communicate.

Going back to the idea of the letter, autocorrect has allowed us to significantly decrease the formality of our language. Because we are able to understand words that very loosely resemble the other words they were intended to be, we lose the sense of responsibility for going back and editing what we are trying to convey and our desire for conciseness. With letters, the ritual was you sat down and wrote in the most understandable language as neatly and correctly as possible. Now, we don’t think twice when we get a text from a family member saying “meat you at DEA mall tonight!” The meaning still gets across, but our ability to understand has become heightened.

So what does this all mean? Well, I don’t think we can entirely throw all our rules about language away, because after all, without a basis and a “standard” to go off of, would we really be able to understand autocorrects madness? Without standards to language, nothing would be able to be understood. There would be no right or wrong to guide us to understanding each other. However, putting all of this into perspective, language does reveal itself to be adaptable once the standards are solidified and widely understood and recognized. Once a standard is established, something that everyone can make have basis of understand off of, then there are no limits to how it is manipulated and utilized. And autocorrect is no exception.