Visit Laura's blog!

I'm adding a link here to Laura's blog, it's looking great.

Ran a spellcheck on this blog yesterday- wow.... Our dependence on electronic editors may be having more impact on our skill sets than we've anticipated. Thinking back to manual typewriters and whiteout, both now seem positively medieval, but they did encourage us to spell carefully!.

Read a piece in the Chicago commuter rag Redeye about a trend among <= 20-somethings that dismisses this weakness in their communications: they r abbrev everthing,as is done in IM convos, kwim (know what I mean?) It's def a trend u can c...sigh.

I was thinking this could be interpreted as yet another sign of the general decline in discourse and in communication skills. But then, triggered no doubt by the word "sign", I started wondering if it might also be symptomatic of a creeping evolution of English language words into pictograms, or as Pound and Fenellosa had it, "ideograms", "The English Written Character as a Medium for Poetry"?

Ok, ok, so I'm optimistic, but if definitely can become def, DF or its scripted equivalent might not be that far over the horizon. Anyone familiar with the development of Chinese or Japanese written characters, feel free to jump in here :)