Lino Bugeja’s piece on the need to read and the right to write (‘Global language of Internet’ - May 23) prompted me to share a few thoughts here on this topic.

The first dictionary was published in 1806 by Marion Webster, and ever since the idea of an important principle that words be written in a specific manner was introduced as a rule in our schools.

Grammar had been around since a long time before, yet the importance of the perfect grammar principle is something becoming part of our school system rather at the same time.

With the introduction of a new popular form of communication requiring written language, together with the introduction of technology able to control both spelling and grammar, the topic has once more come to the fore regarding the importance of spelling and precise grammar.

It has been shown through many studies that the human mind can read written words “in a wrong manner” as easily as those written properly as long as the first and last letter are correct.

The truth is that many are those who, when reading, do not stop to see every letter, and, often, their mind will be one or two words ahead from a particular page. This phenomenon arises when one reads aloud and pronounces the expected word rather than what there is written in the page. Although few are those who, when encountering different spelling and grammar on the Internet think in this manner, they would be expressing a subtle form of rebellion against the idea that language should be something formal and exact.

Though perhaps not aware of what they would be doing, they would be making use of a language in a more than normal artistic manner, exactly as the Impressionists did with art in the past.

Many writers twist and confute languages to create things which languages are not supposed to make

What is lacking in most of those individuals is that they do not fully realise what they are concocting. The ability of the Impressionist did not lie in their lack of ability to paint in the most traditional forms, but in how they could be aware by understanding those forms and succeed in experimenting beyond.

Many writers of the past, and many yet to come, twist and confute languages to create things which languages are not supposed to make, and language will continue to change, as it always did.

Yet, this dash towards anagrams, alternative spellings and distance from grammar, most probably will decline with the growth and awareness of the present generation that much of what they say is misunderstood due to their lack of ability to insert a comma in its proper place, and their absolute ignorance of the semi-colon.

These last few years, hundreds of new words and phrases that come from Internet slang have been added to the dictionary. Some of them are abbreviations, like FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and YOLO (You Only Live Once). Others are words that havebeen stretched into more parts ofspeech than originally intended - like when “trend” became a verb (“It’s trending worldwide”).

Others still have emerged as we adapt our language to new technologies;think “crowdfunding,” “selfie” and “cyberbullying”.

You might notice how many of these ‘new’ words are actually just appropriated, meaning they are pre-existing words that are combined or given entirely new meanings.

For example, “social network” became a word in the Oxford English Dictionary back in 1973, referring to the physical activity of networking in a social atmosphere. In the 1990s, people began using the term to refer to virtual engagement, and that became an official definition in 1998.

So many new words and phrases are emerging from the Internet, and so quickly. Slang is spreading between cities and countries. I sincerely do not know what it takes for a slang word to become a word in the dictionary.

The internet is not the only technological phenomenon that has changed the way we talk. Radio, television, and telephones have introduced their fair share of new words and phrases into our lexicon over thelast century.

To conclude, while apparently Internet has harmed the standards of grammar and spelling, it is not yet clear whether this was a positive or negative step.

Mark Said is a senior legal counsel.

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