Richard Gottlieb

Do You Speak "New English?"
March 9, 2008

Having been an English Literature major in college, I was made to become only to aware of what was called “Old English,” “Middle English” and “Modern English.” In fact I was forced to memorize, in college mind you, the opening stanzas to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English (and people wonder why former English Lit majors go into business rather than become professors).

I am not going to punish you with the first four sentences, which I oddly can still remember (as I can also remember, amazingly, all of the lines of the Super Chicken song) but if you follow this hyperlink you can see for yourself that, though only written 600 years ago is pretty unintelligible to a modern reader.

I believe we may be undergoing a shift of similar seismic proportions right now. It is called texting or text messaging or TxTing and I am going to go ahead and coin it “New English.” It is largely seen as a means for young adults, teens and tweens to communicate with each other in a manner that is both unintelligible and out of the hearing of their parents.  It has, however, resulted in for all extents and purposes a new language consisting of acronyms, abbreviations, symbols, smiley faces and in general a lot of dropped vowels. 

People who use it find that it creeps into their everyday writing and language and hence is showing up in high school and college term papers much to the distress of various teachers and professors. In fact, five of last years ten top novels in Japan were written in TxTing. It is so common that I said something funny to a person in their 20’s the other day and instead of actually laughing out loud they said “LOL” which is how texters let someone know they just laughed out loud. 

So, how does this apply to the toy industry? Well, I guess you may want to ask yourself if your consumers (tweens, teens, many kids and a rising tide of adults) are speaking a different language than the one you are using on your packaging, your game boards, your rules, your advertising, in your office, around the water cooler and at the conference table.   

In that it is a different language, I have found a website called “lingo2word” which provides a definitions for acronyms, emoticons, smileys, TxTing, SMS and other words and symbols used in the “New English.” You may want to check it out so that you can become literate in the “New English” and so you can have a place to consider some new terms to use with your products. 

So, as I sign off, let me just give you the discomforting news that in the New English, “toy” does not mean, well, “toy”. It means: “Thinking of you.”

Toy,

Richard

Posted by Richard Gottlieb on March 9, 2008 | Comments (0)