Never
in the past had I thought that something such as the English language would
actually continue to evolve. I mean yeah, it seems normal- nothing rare, but
just something we don’t usually hear or learn about. And its not only me, in
his article, Malady also points it out, “He says that Americans have become accustomed to an
English language that doesn’t vary widely by region or over time”. To think that something as the
common language developing- something we use at a daily base, and something our
parents use (and used) the same was, it makes me-our generation feel old.
The
first think I realized while reading Matthew J.X. Malady’s article Will We Use Commas in the Future, was
the use of absolutely no commas. It bothered me at the beginning. Not because
it was hard to understand, or written in an incoherent way. But because there
were no commas! At all! And growing up learning to use them and being forced to
constantly place them in each sentence, to now see that they could potentially
be unnecessary was kind of troubling. Although, considering how uncomplicated Malady
wrote his piece, without using commas kind of make sense to me. Yeah it may
take a while to get accustomed to the idea -I tried to and couldn’t- but after
all, change is always better right?
After
giving it some more thought, and wrapping my head around the idea, I believe our
society could be ready to embark on a language that does not depend so
contingently on the comma. I do trust that we could possibly manage to “purge”-
as Malady puts it- the comma in our daily written language and still be able to
structure a piece of writing fairly well. I don’t mean only in the act of
“texting”, something we do every day all the time, but in actual school
reports, or even work obligations. Yeah, probably I didn’t succeed to do so
(probably making this whole piece ironic), but Malady did, and therefore, we
could all get adapted to do the same. He says in his piece: “we’re pretty creative and
capable when it comes to dealing with such language issues”, and he is right,
we could ultimately get adapted to the privation of the comma too. After all, commas are what make placing semicolons and colons complicated;
they are just there to ease making mistakes. Lets take a chance and develop our
language.
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