Author: nkarpluk

A few scattered thoughts on today’s presentations and readings:

I am not a gatekeeper of language.  I do not possess the skills or the will to protect so called “standard” English against other invaders.  I do agree that there is a time and a place for different registers, but this needs to be taught explicitly.  Different registers should not be condemned in and of themselves.  Informal language has it’s place in our lives, as does academic or standard English. But we should not be placing different registers or dialects of English (or other languages) in hierarchies to each other.  As Carrington notes, arguments and crisis such as the one presented by the Australian media on the decline of standard English “establishes battle lines between competing textual forms and social practices” (168-69).  Language helps us communicate, think – particularly about more abstract constructs, and express ourselves.  Both Standard English and texting are used to communicate but in different arenas at different times.  We cannot the practice of communication in one area and context because it does not look like what we expect or want it to look like.

There are also unintended benefits and spin-off effects of being fluent in several registers or dialects.  For example: I grew up without the internet.  My family did not have a computer until I was 13.  I was terrible at typing in school and it was A CLASS.  JC! – we had a TYPING CLASS, and was terrible at it.  FML.  Anyways, it was not until MSN Messenger came around that I could actually type. It was slow at first; it wasn’t instantaneous, but if you wanted to IM, it was less embarrassing to not take fifteen minutes crafting a three sentence paragraph all the while your chat partner looking on watching the screen as “typing…” flashed.  The more I engaged socially, the more adept I became at a very real life skill – typing. And the more engaged I was with the medium, the more fluent in it’s lingo and structure I became.  So this debate is not brand new.  This text language did not just show up with the advent of the popularization of the cell phone.  I was saying “G2g”, “LOL”, “BRB” before it was kool too (I AM a hipster, why do you ask?).  Being fluent in this speak/text did not impair my learning or knowledge of standard English; if anything it deepened my understanding of it.  Being fluent in one register, dialect or form of language does not need to impede on the other.   As noted, “all competent language users shift between various types and forms of textual and other language use on a daily, even hourly basis in the course of our daily activities” (Carrinton 168) already. Going from talking to your boss, to your co-workers, to your clients/employees, family, parents-in-law, people you went to high school with, lovers, spouses, or friends, already takes a lot of skill.  These language skills are slowly honed and (sometimes) taught; why is texting treated any differently?

Languages evolve, mutate, change and go backwards.  Languages are lazy and constantly adapt and look for shortcuts.  As Carrington states on this discussion: “[p]olemic, or oppositional positions, between Standard English and texting are
discursively constructed, with txting represented  as the abnormal intruder” (167).  Setting up this black and white dichotomies is not a valuable or useful activity.  English is not that simple.  Our job as language arts pupils is not to be complete prescriptive in our approach to language (there is obviously some prescription in the classroom, but we have to be flexible). because language itself never stops changing.  We have to observe how it adapts, describe that adaptation, and deal with the new and resulting patterns and forms.  We can TRY to hammer English down, peg it, classify it, and make it  one thing all we want, but the only language to stop changing is a dead one (ex. Latin).

Carrington, Victoria.  “Txting: The End of Civilization (Again)?” Cambridge Journal of Education 35.2 (2005): 161-175. Online.

Sorry this is a little late…

Gary R. Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheon’s article “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success”: Biologically” is a very interesting and different perspective on adaptation theory.  I found it very engaging and thought provoking, though I did not follow (or like) the homology to biology nearly as much as I did the ideas of adaptation.  To start with, as they stated, it is a “common determination to judge an adaptation’s success only in relation to its faithfulness or closeness to the ‘original’ or ‘source’ text” (Bortolotti 444).  The pair of authors clearly do not agree with this (nor do I).  As noted, humans have been adapting stories for as long as we have been telling stories.  We naturally adapt stories, whether from one medium or form to another or within the same from/medium but for new or different audiences.  What we cannot do is judge a text or work based on how “true” it was too the original because, if we are going to be serious here, there are not a lot of TRULY original tales.  That is not a bad thing; I’m just saying, we really cannot write outside of the human experience because, duh, we are human, and the human experience, though not super limited, has really, truly be done to death in the last couple thousand years.  To write anything you adapt from your own experience and from the collective experience of being a part of the human race and all the cultural, genetic, social etc. heritage that goes with that.

But back, to adaptations on a more coherent and logical level: films.  Adaptations are more and more common these days in Hollywood.  I constantly hear this: Hollywood has no new ideas left, and well that is far from the truth, there are A LOT of adoptions going on in the popular media sphere at this moment, but a large part of this has to do with one undeniable fact: people like adaptations.  So we may think to ourselves: Okay, so my favourite book is being made into a movie (it was called On the Road, and yes, it wasn’t great but not because it was an adaptation but because it was literally only people getting ‘effed up and experimenting sexually); it’s probably going to suck, but I am going to check it out to see how someone else interpreted something that I already love. Now all cannot be winners (see On the Road comment), but we still go see them, right?  We are the ones shelling out money for them and make it possible for them to exist. Adaptations are never going to be the exact same as the original so on a literal level they will always fail as being “true” to the original.   And it is debatable what the “spirit of a text” is as we bring our own experiences to the viewing/reading/participation with the text. No  two people interpret texts (even straight forward ones) the same so how could we ever agree if something was “true” to the original? Of course, I am not saying EVERYTHING is good because it’s all subjective and someone may love this because of blah blah blah… That is NOT what I am saying. We cannot deny that there IS bad art (even if people like it), but we should judge things on their own merit as art or text or whatever and NOT on what they are adapted from.  The relationships between texts, adaptations, originals, etc. IS super interesting, but it is not fair to judge anything on a extremely subjective “true” “spirit” of the original because, as noted above, nothing is really original anymore.  Thanks for listening to my rant.