Monday, 3/20

Apparently I am now a dinosaur.

Several times this weekend on my Facebook news feed (http://www.facebook.com/jim.koski1) a particular story from a couple of years ago made a re-appearance. I don't know if you've noticed the stories going around about how a particular rule of writing is rapidly changing, but it's made me realize that I'm on one side of the fence on this subject, and it's probably, in the long run, the wrong side. Because of the way in which texting has insinuated itself into American society, there's now a way that writing experts can separate “old” people from “young” people, and that's by this--

If, while typing, you leave two spaces after ending a sentence, you're “old”. If you leave one (or none), you're “young”. If you leave two spaces after ending a sentence, you learned how to write in the 20^th century. If you leave one (or none), you learned how to write in the age of 160-character text messages or 140-character Tweets; i.e. this century.  Now go back to the lines I just wrote, and count how many spaces I left after finishing a sentence.

Yup. I AM apparently a dinosaur.

I knew this day would come. I knew that, at a certain point in my life, I'd be faced with something that told me time was moving on and leaving me behind. I had no idea what that “something” would be. I figured it would be something like having my leg break while trying to stand up or wondering who the heck this Gigi Hadid is and just exactly how she's connected to the Kardashians. But nope; I'm fine as far as stuff like that goes.

I'm a dinosaur because of the way I type.

And when you think about it, it's funny. I never took a typing class. I never learned how to type “correctly”, a fact that drives my properly-educated-in-typing wife mad. I just learned how to type by doing. I started with one finger, added another, and have sailed through life slowly adding fingers to my typing repertoire. Over the years, my right thumb became quite adept at hitting the space bar twice when finishing a sentence.

Now, as I find out, that skill is becoming about as relevant as getting up off the couch, walking over to TV, and using a dial to change the channel.

You DO remember what a TV dial is, right?

One of the reasons “the kids” only use one space after a sentence is that when you send a text you only have 160 characters to use, and a space counts as a character. So when it comes to texting, I can understand why you would only want to leave one space after a sentence. But when you're typing a note or a letter or an e-mail or (even) a blog, you're not constrained by the amount of spaces you leave after a sentence. Heck, if you wanted to, you could even leave THIS many spaces after a sentence.             Of course, your paragraph structure would all weird if you did it that way, but unlike a text message, there's nothing to stop you from doing it.

I guess I just find it funny that one particular form of writing is making all other kinds of writing conform to its particular quirks. I”m not surprised; after all, I've studied the English language enough to know that it's a very elastic, living type of creature. It's constantly evolving (much, I'm sure, to the detriment of William Shakespeare and those who've study him the past 400 years). But to change just because of a 160-character limit imposed by technology, and then to claim that anyone who doesn't use the change is out of date?

Well...I guess I now know how those Tyrannosaurus Rexs felt, just before the meteor hit 65 million years ago and sent them all into oblivion.

(jim@wmqt.com), typing dinosaur.