I chastise the young guys on my team all the time. They claim I use "big words."
I accused them of using "Newspeak" as in 1984. Apparently NONE of them ever read 1984.
I told them that the concept behind Newspeak and Big Brother was that we use language to express our thoughts. With Newspeak, the concept was, if you limit vocabulary, you hamper the ability to express complex ideas.
The larger the vocabulary, the better able we are to express complexity and subtle differences.
One if my guys is a musician an I asked him to imagine composing but only being able to use 2 notes, with no variance. You can compose music, but not as complex as you can with a full freight of notes and color.
I think that texting, email and IM are dangerous in their ways. One of my remote testers would send me emails using texting abbreviations.
I asked her if her Intranet provider charged her for emails by the number of characters. It drove me crazy.
My guys have said that all the young people do it, to which I responded, "If all the young people jump off the roof, do you have to as well?"
I mean I was young too, and much wilder than any of my guys are.
It's sort of strange if I compare generations, their world electronically is larger but physically their world is much much much smaller than it was in my day. I mean, their physical worlds seem really miniscule. Almost like they're trapped by their cell phones into tiny little spaces.
Their curiosity about things seems much more limited. Plus there's also an almost willful ignorance.
They also seem to shock incredibly easily, which surprises me the most.
I must be turning into an old git.