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smirkingcata few days ago, Gideon Lewis-Kraus interviewed the makers of auto correct. the article can be found and read here.
whats very interesting when you think about it, is how auto correct has changed our way of writing and thinking. I don't know about you, but me personal, still types most of what I need to type first in the plain Editor and then I print it, reread it and try to cancel out all the mistakes I made. and only after that I put it in word and let auto correct tell me what I missed. so yes, I am still going the long way round, having it disabled at my mobile phone too.
but does that mean that I am not dependent on auto correct, as Lewis-Kraus points out that most of us are these days? no way! I am because I want my texts to leave a image of: yes, I can type and write very well, thank you.
but when it comes to language, for us Germans (and I think the English too, through my research on them was not very deep) in opposition to the French (don't know if that one is still working) , Chinese, Japanese (that one was shut down, might do an entry on it later on) have NO political agency that dictates how we need to write and what is true and correct and what is just plain wrong.
in succession this means that really there is no wrong in German and maybe English (tell me if there are any agency out there)
what we think of as wrong spelling/word crimes/cruelty to language is not against rules it's against a norm. we where taught: "this is how German is written.this is what a sentence is. this is how you use verbs, nouns, adjectives and everything else."
but really these are just norms, made by big organizations like for German: Der Duden.
this is a bunch of people - in these days mostly journalists, in the past some of them, and further in the past most of them very linguistic experts- who sit together and decide how they think German should be written. and then the weird process starts. because then the ministry for education comes and says: "uhh yeah, you did a new thing, didn't you. well, thats so very kind, we are going to make it a highly desired recommendation that your rules should be applied to what our kids write in school and higher education."
and thats how the norms, that some of you see often discard come to existence. so really no rules.
I can only guess that in the English language its the same- but do not take my word for it, not an expert there!
but- and thats a BIG sociological BUT:
we as people are more sensitive to broken norms than to broken rules!
we feel that rules reduce our freedom and so we in large do not like them very well. on the other hand we feel that norms are a way of proper conduct that we like to preserve and see correctly acted on.
so what does it really mean when auto correct influences how we write and that word crimes are something we have the feel to fight against?
I would be interested to know what you might think about,
my personal opinion is: it means we have more time to think about what we write instead of how. and that of course the norms we grew up to know will be better preserved than those of our grandparents or others ever before, but I think there are a lot more of hidden aspects, that I did not touch here, and might not even have ever thought about
whats very interesting when you think about it, is how auto correct has changed our way of writing and thinking. I don't know about you, but me personal, still types most of what I need to type first in the plain Editor and then I print it, reread it and try to cancel out all the mistakes I made. and only after that I put it in word and let auto correct tell me what I missed. so yes, I am still going the long way round, having it disabled at my mobile phone too.
but does that mean that I am not dependent on auto correct, as Lewis-Kraus points out that most of us are these days? no way! I am because I want my texts to leave a image of: yes, I can type and write very well, thank you.
but when it comes to language, for us Germans (and I think the English too, through my research on them was not very deep) in opposition to the French (don't know if that one is still working) , Chinese, Japanese (that one was shut down, might do an entry on it later on) have NO political agency that dictates how we need to write and what is true and correct and what is just plain wrong.
in succession this means that really there is no wrong in German and maybe English (tell me if there are any agency out there)
what we think of as wrong spelling/word crimes/cruelty to language is not against rules it's against a norm. we where taught: "this is how German is written.this is what a sentence is. this is how you use verbs, nouns, adjectives and everything else."
but really these are just norms, made by big organizations like for German: Der Duden.
this is a bunch of people - in these days mostly journalists, in the past some of them, and further in the past most of them very linguistic experts- who sit together and decide how they think German should be written. and then the weird process starts. because then the ministry for education comes and says: "uhh yeah, you did a new thing, didn't you. well, thats so very kind, we are going to make it a highly desired recommendation that your rules should be applied to what our kids write in school and higher education."
and thats how the norms, that some of you see often discard come to existence. so really no rules.
I can only guess that in the English language its the same- but do not take my word for it, not an expert there!
but- and thats a BIG sociological BUT:
we as people are more sensitive to broken norms than to broken rules!
we feel that rules reduce our freedom and so we in large do not like them very well. on the other hand we feel that norms are a way of proper conduct that we like to preserve and see correctly acted on.
so what does it really mean when auto correct influences how we write and that word crimes are something we have the feel to fight against?
I would be interested to know what you might think about,
my personal opinion is: it means we have more time to think about what we write instead of how. and that of course the norms we grew up to know will be better preserved than those of our grandparents or others ever before, but I think there are a lot more of hidden aspects, that I did not touch here, and might not even have ever thought about
