
Poor spelling in graffiti is often the norm. Omitting the G in “ing” verbs and nouns is common. “Tagging” becomes “taggin’” but they seldom add the trailing apostrophe to note there are missing letters. Worse, many examples are seen in message board commentary, where an “ing” word is not only missing a G, but is also misspelled in a sort of phonetic way. “Sucking” becomes “Sucken”, an entirely new word.
The degeneration of spelling through the medium referred to as “texting” is an abomination. In “texting” the new word “sucken” becomes “sukn” or perhaps “sckn”.
A curious thing about this message is that one would expect the word “snitch” to be misspelled “snich” but it is not. If this vandal-with-a-message was educated enough to correctly spell a word containing a camouflaged letter, then why omit the G? Was it because he ran out of room?
According to Wikipedia, “Snitch” may refer to:
A pejorative term for an informant "Snitch" (song), by Obie Trice Stop Snitchin', a campaign against people who provide information to law enforcement about criminal activity Golden Snitch, a ball in the Quidditch game of the Harry Potter series “Snitch”, aka “Monument Ave.”, a 1998 thriller film
Note that even Wiki contracts “Snitching” to “Snitchin’” but includes an apostrophe.
“Snitch” is a word from a bygone era, the ‘20’s perhaps. What ever happened to “Squealer” or “tattle-tale” or “stool pigeon” or “fink”? Why haven’t vandals invented a new word? “Narc” has even degenerated from a drug culture informant to just a general informant noun and verb.
In an earlier rant, the degeneration of our language was lamented, noting that it began with a series of grunts. It progressed slowly, over generations, into a complex language with thousands of descriptive words. Now, it seems to be rapidly returning to a series of grunts.
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Labels: dumpster, graffiti
2 Comments:
At Thursday, July 08, 2010 8:00:00 AM,
Twilight said…
YAY! Go get 'em anyjazz!
I often cringe at the headlines on Huffington Post and in comments - they've adopted some recent rather peculiar word usage. For example using "rip" as an alternative to "confront" or "argue passionately": "Rachel Maddow rips Limbaugh".
I realise this is a contraction of "rips him a new a/h, but that doesn't make it any better!
Another example: using "rock" as a verb - eg
"She really rocks that skimpy dress", meaning (kind of) wears it well, gives it extra significance..... I think.
I suppose this is what's meant by language evolving. :-(
At Thursday, July 08, 2010 9:23:00 AM,
anyjazz said…
Yes, applying new meanings to existing words is a bit of a leap too. Do you think maybe the language is evolving to maybe a dozen contracted words and a few emoticons? Perhaps our writing will eventually look like the ancient petroglyphs and our conversations will sound like a meeting of Australian Bushmen?
I wonder if these grammatical geese realize that misspelled words and improper usage actually reduces the communication of their message.
Or perhaps I should try to communicate with them so that they will understand it.
Yo! Word up! Yr lame flap got no cred.
I probably did that incorrectly.
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