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Okay, you might or might not know the constructed language Toki Pona, but we're certainly still learning, so I think we can construct a good metaphor.
( A hypothetical conversation about food. )Tags:
(original thread version on Weirder Earth, a Mastodon instance using the Hometown fork. Lightly edited.)
"mastodon" is spelled "mastadon" because the 'o' there is reduced to schwa and 'a' is the most schwa-like vowel letter in English. Same thing behind "definite" and "definate" - a schwa got spelled with an 'a', it's phonetic as hell. It sucks when it's in a hashtag because that splits the hashtag, but mostly it doesn't matter which you use - it's just an "uh" sound, it's the most generic sound possible.
Anyway all writing is a lie, if people understand you then you succeeded, go push the grammaticasters into a pool and live your life.
Sorry, that was kind of judgey.
What you're feeling when you cringe at "mastadon" is damage that was done to you. It is all the people who fucked you up because it was more important to them that you looked like a rich white person than that you survived intact - probably because they got fucked up the same way, because that's what generational trauma is. It fucking sucks and I get it.
But the answer to generational trauma isn't to pass it on, it's to heal.
And everyone knows what "mastadon" is. It's the "calling all photocopers xeroxes" word for the microblogging side of fedi.
20 year old Packbats: I know I'm on the Internet, but I'm going to spell everything correctly, with proper grammar, because that's just the kind of man I am!
37 year old Packbats: I'm not a man and spelling is fake and that makes me really mad because "actually, 'muchly' has been a part of English since the 1620s" is a really cool historical fact and completely irrelevant to why this jackass needs to shut the fuck up about our grammar
(yes, we're still bitter about the person who said that "thanks muchly!" was incorrect to us last year - they knew exactly what we meant, they were able to paraphrase it perfectly)
(don't be like that person, thank you and we appreciate it)
Addendum the next morning:
We care about this because that "you must spell it this way" damage isn't just a thing for those of us who do spell it the way we're told, it's a thing for those of us who can't.
Like, listen: we suck at remembering names, they slide right out of our head, they're arbitrary sounds and they barely come up most of the time ... and for a lot of people, that's spellings of words.
Plus there's disabilities affecting writing.
Plus there's differences of education.
And the thing about mocking people who don't spell it the way they "must" is that that mockery always always always lands on those who can't, over and over and over, and is used as justification for shutting down anything they have to say.
It has a discriminatory impact.
It marginalizes people.
Addendum 2: everything we know about schwas we know from that one Language Files video from two years ago. Shoutout to Tom Scott, Molly Ruhl, and Gretchen McCulloch.
(Emeto content warning on video for brief comment+animation about almost throwing up.)
"How to bring a language to the future" is a pretty good article about a struggle to stop technological conventions from dismantling a language and its culture.
A quote:
Part of the reason nastaʿlīq [the script used to write Urdu] ran into trouble was because the technology at the time — specifically the typewriter — was built with English in mind. Subsequently, as historian Thomas S. Mullaney notes in his book, “The Chinese Typewriter,” all other languages are seen as permutations from that norm. Hebrew is English but backward. Arabic is English backward and in cursive. Russian: English with different letters. Siamese: English with too many letters. Perhaps the only major language to escape the thumb of Latin hegemony was Chinese, a script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic, and thus had to be imagined entirely outside the box of existing technology. But nastaʿlīq, presumably not quite significant enough to send typographers back to the drawing board, remained stalled until the 1970s, its mechanical rendering nowhere close to the sweep and flourish of the handwritten script.
