Holi thoughts

I've just got off the keyboard after sending an email to a young squirt of whom I am inordinately fond and I had food for thought. So I climbed back on the keyboard again.

What is it about the cell phone generation that leads them to prefer SMS and chatting to sending emails? Is it instant gratification, is it laziness, is it sloppiness, is it impetuosity, is it convenience, is it plain orneriness? A bit of all, I guess. I conducted a straw poll with others of Squirt's generation (well, a few years younger actually) and it was universal - SMS and chatting scores over email.

I guess it's a generational thing. much as I prefer emails to putting pen to paper, they prefer putting thumb to keypad.

To quote what I wrote to Squirt:
How can writing mail be a pain? In the first place you get a human-sized keyboard to bash the thing out on instead of a gnat-sized bunch of numbers masquerading as letters. Then you have a screen large enough to watch movies on and on which letters and characters assume their normal size instead of being scrunched into a space that a self-respecting flea would scoff at. Finally, a mail by its very existence speaks of thought and care and premeditation unlike an SMS that is a thing of whimsy and flightiness.

The other thing that bothers me about SMSes and chats is the way that they promote crappy spelling and absent grammar. It's all very well to say that a language is a living thing and it evolves exactly by such maltreatment. I still think it's cruel to abjure punctuation and to maul words into phonetic spellings. Phoney-tic, more like it. There's a reason that the English language does not have a phonetic script - so we can have spelling bees.

For instance, in Hindi, it would be fairly impossible to misspell a word - you pronounce it like so, you spell it like so. Boring. English is so much more exciting and unpredictable.

Apropos of languages, I also mooted an addition to the Latin vocabulary in my mail to Squirt. I'm reproducing it here as a copyright measure. Squirt was protesting my use of "Coolio" when I meant "Cool". I had to clarify:

Coolio is actually Latin. First conjugation from the infinitive cooliare, meaning to be cool; first person coolio, meaning I am cool. The other declensions are coolias, cooliat, cooliamus, cooliatis, cooliant . Meaning respectively, you are cool, he/she/it is cool, we are cool, you (plural) are cool and they are cool. Now you can impress your friends. Coolias.