Are today’s youths afflicted with the sloppiness of thought?
By JOYCE HOOI 07 November 2009
The economy must be recovering - booming even. In fact, any time now, we will hear of bankers again being able to make the payments on their Ferraris and redeem their Pradas from the pawnbroker.
I say this not because of some stellar background in economics; in fact, I would be hard-pressed to tell you whether the economy has gone W-shaped or pear-shaped.
But the evidence is clear. When questions about Ris Low and beauty pageants are directed by Members of Parliament at the Minister for Trade and Industry, it must be safe to assume our exports are in fine form, so much more pressing is the concern about Ms Low.
While the Miss World Singapore fiasco has understandably been a source of consternation, much of the hand-wringing has been misplaced, as the nation found itself wondering: what’s wrong with Ms Low and, by extension, what’s wrong with us?
Insular slant
Do we force poor speakers of English into the Speak Good English movement the same way fat kids are prodded onto the track? Maybe the Singapore Tourism Board can work a Marina Bay integrated resort plug into contestants’ answers during the Q&A session.
This approach bears a decidedly insular slant, because there is nothing wrong with us.
Beauty queens have made fools of themselves for years, regardless of nationality, culture or type of pageant.
During a Q&A session in 2007, a certain Miss South Carolina Teen held millions of YouTube users captive with her reasoning that ‘US Americans’ were not able to find their own country on a map because most of them did not have maps.
This phenomenon of the mouth charging ahead of the brain and falling over itself is not limited to the toothy and beautiful. There are countless videos of people from various continents making incoherent and inarticulate statements on the Internet.
So what is wrong, if nothing is wrong with us, specifically?
Amid the apparently random quality of stupidity, a common factor has emerged. It’s the young people: they are getting more stupid - and I say this as a young person myself, the same way only you can say your own mother is fat.
This is less of a social divide issue or a decrying of the pageant circuit, but more of a generational concern. The debate is more than just about one silly girl; it is about one stupid generation.
Everything that Ms Low has been vilified for - bad English, poor judgment and a love of infamy - are the defining characteristics of a generation raised by Facebook, distracted by Twitter and preoccupied with Photoshopping their snaps.
To illustrate this dire reality, a friend of mine who is old enough to be a Roy Orbison fan overheard a young employee in his office say, ‘dot dot dot’, and hadn’t the faintest clue what it could possibly mean, save for being Morse code.
To his abject horror, I told him that it had originated from the dots within an ellipse, which were used in comic strips to demonstrate a character’s loss for words, usually in relation to something someone else had done or said.
In a few generations, we have gone from actually thinking up witty comebacks to resigning ourselves to having nothing clever to say - to using punctuation as a substitute reply.
People have also taken to saying ‘gg’ when they admit defeat or do badly at something - an abbreviation of the congratulatory and rueful ‘good game’ offered by loser to winner in online gaming. One day, profit warning statements on the Singapore Exchange website will contain nothing but ‘gg’.
Some argue that function should reign over form and that good English is unnecessarily wordy in this Picasa age. To which I say poppycock, balderdash and hornswoggle.
In 1946, George Orwell (who? oh, go Wikipedia him, you young fool) said that ‘(the English language) becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts’.
In the modern context, this means that if you are inclined to say things like ‘bigini’, you are likelier to tell people that a ‘bigini top’ is all you wear on Orchard Road. That’s a sentiment both foolish in itself and for the fact that it was freely expressed.
Singaporeans should not be worrying about how a beauty queen is perceived - a most irrelevant barometer of intelligence and progress, anyway. They should be worrying about generation after generation of people who will increasingly become sloppy in thought and tongue. If this continues, I’m afraid we’ll all eventually be forced to say, ‘gg’.
2 comments:
Lowering the Common Denominator
Are today’s youths afflicted with the sloppiness of thought?
By JOYCE HOOI
07 November 2009
The economy must be recovering - booming even. In fact, any time now, we will hear of bankers again being able to make the payments on their Ferraris and redeem their Pradas from the pawnbroker.
I say this not because of some stellar background in economics; in fact, I would be hard-pressed to tell you whether the economy has gone W-shaped or pear-shaped.
But the evidence is clear. When questions about Ris Low and beauty pageants are directed by Members of Parliament at the Minister for Trade and Industry, it must be safe to assume our exports are in fine form, so much more pressing is the concern about Ms Low.
While the Miss World Singapore fiasco has understandably been a source of consternation, much of the hand-wringing has been misplaced, as the nation found itself wondering: what’s wrong with Ms Low and, by extension, what’s wrong with us?
Insular slant
Do we force poor speakers of English into the Speak Good English movement the same way fat kids are prodded onto the track? Maybe the Singapore Tourism Board can work a Marina Bay integrated resort plug into contestants’ answers during the Q&A session.
This approach bears a decidedly insular slant, because there is nothing wrong with us.
Beauty queens have made fools of themselves for years, regardless of nationality, culture or type of pageant.
During a Q&A session in 2007, a certain Miss South Carolina Teen held millions of YouTube users captive with her reasoning that ‘US Americans’ were not able to find their own country on a map because most of them did not have maps.
This phenomenon of the mouth charging ahead of the brain and falling over itself is not limited to the toothy and beautiful. There are countless videos of people from various continents making incoherent and inarticulate statements on the Internet.
So what is wrong, if nothing is wrong with us, specifically?
Amid the apparently random quality of stupidity, a common factor has emerged. It’s the young people: they are getting more stupid - and I say this as a young person myself, the same way only you can say your own mother is fat.
This is less of a social divide issue or a decrying of the pageant circuit, but more of a generational concern. The debate is more than just about one silly girl; it is about one stupid generation.
Everything that Ms Low has been vilified for - bad English, poor judgment and a love of infamy - are the defining characteristics of a generation raised by Facebook, distracted by Twitter and preoccupied with Photoshopping their snaps.
To illustrate this dire reality, a friend of mine who is old enough to be a Roy Orbison fan overheard a young employee in his office say, ‘dot dot dot’, and hadn’t the faintest clue what it could possibly mean, save for being Morse code.
To his abject horror, I told him that it had originated from the dots within an ellipse, which were used in comic strips to demonstrate a character’s loss for words, usually in relation to something someone else had done or said.
In a few generations, we have gone from actually thinking up witty comebacks to resigning ourselves to having nothing clever to say - to using punctuation as a substitute reply.
People have also taken to saying ‘gg’ when they admit defeat or do badly at something - an abbreviation of the congratulatory and rueful ‘good game’ offered by loser to winner in online gaming. One day, profit warning statements on the Singapore Exchange website will contain nothing but ‘gg’.
Some argue that function should reign over form and that good English is unnecessarily wordy in this Picasa age. To which I say poppycock, balderdash and hornswoggle.
Slovenly language
In 1946, George Orwell (who? oh, go Wikipedia him, you young fool) said that ‘(the English language) becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts’.
In the modern context, this means that if you are inclined to say things like ‘bigini’, you are likelier to tell people that a ‘bigini top’ is all you wear on Orchard Road. That’s a sentiment both foolish in itself and for the fact that it was freely expressed.
Singaporeans should not be worrying about how a beauty queen is perceived - a most irrelevant barometer of intelligence and progress, anyway. They should be worrying about generation after generation of people who will increasingly become sloppy in thought and tongue. If this continues, I’m afraid we’ll all eventually be forced to say, ‘gg’.
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