I've seen some bloggers write "open letters" to people who will clearly never read their message and certainly wouldn't care, but it makes the writer feel better just to vent. I've become vain enough to take my shot at it.
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Dear Recording Industry,
Although I appreciate some of the trends your people produce and sustain, there is one that is quite unfathomable to me-- the replacement of words for single digit counterparts. I don't know who started it, perhaps the venerable MC Hammer with his hits "2 Legit 2 Quit" and "U Can't Touch This", but that was the eighties. Parachute pants didn't last this long.
Since that time, I have seen it featured, and in my memory I seem to think that it is more prevalent in the rap/pop arenas. Avril Lavine and the Pussycat Dolls contributed their more complex mutations with "Sk8r Boi" and "Stickwitu," respectively.
This was all sad but bearable until it hit a little too close to home. On her debut album, Katharine McPhee has a song named "Not UR Girl" (which is confusing in this dialect because I think it actually is "your", although it might be "you are")
Let's just take a moment to look at the real issue. For some reason, your industry feels it is more marketable to abbreviate nice, respectable, innocent words down from their undefiled state to bastardizations, such as these--
you -- U
are -- R
too, to-- 2
be-- B
see-- C
My question is, who does this appeal to? I realize that I am from a very WASPy demographic, but I don't see who really communicates this way. Is the general populous turned off by those who use entire words in their song titles? Are you perhaps saving money on printing fees by reducing the necessary ink? Surely it's not pure laziness.
Please respect our intelligence. Give a hand to those trying to reintroduce literacy to our country and children.
UR BFF 4EVR,
Sojochick
2 comments:
And that, my dear, is how an open letter is done!
I think it has something to do with this technological age that we've entered into where face to face communication doesn't actually exist anymore. I would even settle for telephone calls but those have also been replaced by emails, pagers and the oh so popular text message. I understand that abbreviations (in my opinion it's more of a new slang or jargon) can make txt msgs simpler and faster but I was apalled last week when I was listening to the CBC (That is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for my American friends) and they were talking about how somewhere (and I can't for the life of me remember where) they were proposing to make it acceptable for students to use this text message lingo in assignments. GIVE ME A BREAK!!! What has happened to the world of academics if I can write a paper that doesn't even resemble the Engish language?? I think we are doing ourselve a disfavour if we allow this crap to enter into the world of academics!
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