Open Writing

Shakespeare was thirty-four when he wrote, “A good old man, sir; he will be talking: as they say, ‘when age is in, the wit is out.’” From where I stand in life, the Bard was still young enough then to be laughing at his elders. It’s just part of growing up. Keep telling yourself that as you watch your kids’ thumbs fly about their cell phones they’re perhaps revealing to their friends your thick headedness and lack of consideration, but you don’t know since they’re using a language you don’t understand.

Several generations ago pig Latin and similar dialects were used by hip youngsters to surreptitiously communicate with each other while the old people were nearby. In the early 1800s young Americans befuddled their parents by using obscure acronyms in place of normal words and phrases, and now they communicate by “texting,” using short bursts of lowercase acronyms, with a few normal words scattered here and there, to share their current thoughts with however many of their friends happen to be using their cells then.

It’s going to get worse; in 2010 eighty-one percent of all Americans between 5 and 24 will possess cell phones. Eighty-five percent of teens engage in “electronic personal communication,” according to a study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in 2008. The good news is that sixty percent of them don’t consider texting to be writing, and eighty-six percent realize “that good writing is important to success in life.”

Parents and the other elderly can bone up on texting at sites like AT&T’s “TXT2Connect with Teens: A Parent’s TXT Tutorial,” or they can try to outthink their kids by studying lists of code words. Netlingo.com claims “The Largest List of Text Message Shorthand” available, where the uninitiated can discover that LOL means “laughing out loud” and “lots of love,” “addy” is short for “address,” and “aiamu” means “and I’m a monkey’s uncle.” You’ll also learn that “9,” “POM,” and “P911” all mean a parent is hovering nearby, and far more distressing terms, as well.

The codes are too fleeting to pursue; by the time you get a clue, they’ll have changed. Instead try honing the communication skills you’ve already mastered by becoming a better, or at least more amusing, writer. You improve through practice, and since the best way to go about that is to make it fun, I recommend working on obscure elements of the language that will baffle the whippersnappers, like back-formations.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “back-formation” as “a new word created by removing an affix from an already existing word.” These affixes include prefixes, like “dis,” “non,” and “il,” and suffixes, like “s.” “Pea” is an interesting back-formation discussed in a Word History from AHD. “In Middle English the ancestor of ‘pea’ was ‘pese’ or ‘pease,’ forms that functioned as both singular and plural. In other words, the ‘s’ was part of the word, not a plural ending. But around the beginning of the 17th century people began to interpret the sound represented by the ‘s’ as a plural ending, and a new singular, spelled ‘pea’ in Modern English, was developed.”

The innovation probably agitated the oldsters, and Shakespeare, who coined hundreds of words, must have given the traditionalists lots to loath. But even the most orthodox among us can find refuge in the fact that most neologisms, defined by AHD as “a new word, expression, or usage,” never make it into the common language. According to Wikipedia, successful neologisms go through several stages: “unstable” (used by only a few), “diffused” (“reached a significant frequency of use, but not yet … widespread”), and “stable” (“recognizable, being ‘en vogue’ … gaining lasting acceptance”). Soon they’re “dated” and, all too soon, then “passe.”

Successful back-formations abound for inspiring neologists: “greed” came from “greediness,” for example, “burgle” from “burglar,” and “isolate” from “isolation.” There’s no reason you can’t use back-forwarding to coin some new terms. The kids will wonder at your serene smile as you write your cronies long personal letters describing how in whack and gruntled you’re feeling, and that, despite it all, you’re still looking pretty darn shoveled.