Chatspeak: Chaucer lives!

When I read this assignment, I was foaming at the mouth at the thought of constructing a list of 75 reasons why I hate chatspeak. But, after I read the point/counterpoint article "Is Chatspeak Destroying English?" I realized that this assignment has nothing to do with my loathing of the atrocity "ur" (as opposed to you're), but everything to do with the evolution of the language that has reshaped education through the ages.

I love Greg Monfils' (the gentleman who penned the counterpoint argument) tribute to Geoffrey Chaucer, a man who knows a little bit about written communication in a non-traditional form. When Chaucer, Virgil, and Dante Alghieri cast off the constraints of traditional language, and chose the pen of the vernacular, it made written communication accessible to the excluded masses, and changed the face of information forever. I am not likening chatspeak to an epic tale of the afterlife penned in Italian, but I am acknowledging its place as an offshoot of the language that will characterize a generation.

10th grade geometry. The only thing I remember is that two girls created their own cryptic language, sort of like a convoluted pig latin, and babbled in this language incessantly, marginalizing the teacher from their epic 15-year-old conversations. Luckily, my friend Tiffany had the song "Double Dutch Bus" on vinyl, so we learned the izza language, which has since been adopted by Snoop Dogg. I remember feeling so cool saying "fo' shizzle," and the memory is quite fresh, because I probably said "fo' shizzle" yesterday. I also remember preparing grammatically-correct English and History assignments, because my passion for "The Double Dutch Bus" remained on Tiffany's turntable. I am with Greg Monfils: creating a language is a means to assert generational identity, and I will trust students to keep chatspeak bound to cell phone screens and informal correspondence. I do not think that chatspeak is destroying English, but instead forging its way as the digital generation's vernacular. Dy-no-mite!