What happened to the use of language? English is a thousand-year-old tradition with finely tuned rules. Why have we completely obliterated it? What once gave us beauty, finesse, and agreement in speech has now been reduced to abbreviations such as “lol,” “2mi,” and “L8R.”

Where we once exercised creativity and expression, we’re now limited to meaningless social phrases. Why do we use “lol” when we can be far more expressive in our choice of words? Instead of “laughing out loud,” I chuckle and giggle; I might titter over a joke, or audibly guffaw at the crass remark of a friend. I won’t limit myself to a single abbreviation when I can chain together adverbs that truly expressing my ecstatic state, not just my laughter.

We use these abbreviations in texting, and I understand that, but must we use them in conversations? The evidence is all around us. Walk around Iowa State’s campus for 15 minutes and you’ll hear it in nearly every conversation among students. Do we really need to take the conventions of texting and apply them to language as a whole?

The consequence of using these conveniences has been the loss of our ability to converse. We begin and end each thought with, “you know” or “you know what I mean.” We’ve lost the beauty of expression. But far more harrowingly, we’ve lost the dignity and authority our voices once carried.

Once upon a time, words were used to declare things and we were certain of their meaning. We knew what was true, and you knew what I was saying when I said it. But now there is a cultural stigma that marks those who sound like they know what they’re talking about. We settle for rising inflections, which we habitually insert at the end of our sentences. It’s as though we wished to express our ignorance. We make the implicit statement, “Don’t think I’m a nerd, I’m just as lost as you are.”

We are lost in a culture where everything can mean anything. We’ve broken our own language down into Orwell’s Newspeak, purposely impoverishing language and limiting our own ability to communicate. We have to ask ourselves, where is the authority and conviction which we once held to be so true?

We’ve invented the most real form of Doublespeak imaginable; we have such ambiguity when we communicate that real correspondence is impossible. Our politics are diluted because of it, our imaginations have been stunted and our very intelligence is limited to our ability to express thoughts and feelings. What world are we moving toward when individuals no longer have the ability to communicate? We become the victims of our own society.

Forget for a moment the minor grammatical rules. Issues such as the split infinitive, although critical in language, mean nothing when we cannot form successful sentences. When we can no longer distinguish the difference between “to,” “too” and “two,” we open ourselves to ignorance. If we can no longer make subjects and verbs agree, how are we to know who or what we’re discussing? How can we defend ourselves in the world when we can no longer understand our closest friends? How can we express our pain, love and joy when we’ve forgotten about the existence of a thesaurus?

Grammar matters, and sadly the rules we learned in elementary school seem to have been forgotten.