One of the things that irks me most is when people purposefully make it difficult to be understood by the majority of people who encounter their communiques. Much has been written about the 'downgrading' of language on the Internet - but that's not my focus here. My focus is on literacy.

If I write, "I ain't got no good English", anyone who speaks English can understand the implicit joke. And that joke is that the sentence makes sense and is understood despite the fact that schools teach that the sentence isn't proper English. We know what it means. But if you toss that same sentence at someone who doesn't speak English well, they may not understand. And the role of communication, for those who need reminding, is to communicate. With whom does one wish to communicate?

And that's where the role of dialect can work against communication itself. Language does evolve, as Pinker demonstrates in The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, and the Internet is full of such evolution. TANSTAAFL was one such example: people who had never read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress were using TANSTAAFL, and were almost always using it properly. Why? Because it embodied a concept that everyone can and should understand: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Of course, the new generation on the Internet may not understand the reference or even the context of the reference. So they won't use it, or they will use it improperly, and the meaning will change. But as the meaning changes, the popular understanding evolves - for better or worse.

People vote with their tongues. And on the Internet, they vote with their keyboards. Generation gaps happen. Linguistic and cultural divides may be reinforced or chipped at. And at the center of this are people who don't really care too much about all of that. They may want to be understood, but when they write or speak they do so with an idea of their audience that is limited by their own group/worldview. And what they may not realize is that their group/worldview are likely a limitation even if they are in the majority - if they truly wish to communicate.

On the Internet, what most people tend to forget is that what they write has the potential to last a very long time. And that they are often measured without their knowing by people using Search Engines and Social Networking sites. Sure, it might have been good to write today... but what about... in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? 100 years? Is being 'cool' now worth being misunderstood later?

After all these years out of school, I finally understand the importance of literacy at a deeper level. One of the greatest things humanity has is a written language that can transcend centuries and allow a temporally distant author to speak to someone in the present day. And all too often people forget that with the Internet, we've extended this beyond books.

Language propagates through popular usage. And I wonder whether future generations will be able to read more than 140 characters of a book at a time when the language they use every day is no longer compatible with the generations previous. Some say that this has already happened. The hope is that the concepts and things worth keeping aren't lost in the sands of time.

And that's all we can really do for literacy.

Hope.