a quick note on (inefficient) language.

this is the last mel c post; it's been a good week. i like how everyone anted up with their own idiosyncratic eating habits for the last post. good show!

speaking of idiosyncratic, i think i just came to an understanding of a particular aspect of language; namely, why so many properties of a given lexicon are gratuitous and/or inefficient.

i was g-chatting with a friend, and i used the ol' smiley face emoticon (shut up, we all use it). i noticed that g-chat so cleverly switches the sideways :) to a right-side up smile once you type it in. that got me to thinking about how people have been using said emoticon for years now, but no one's making keyboards that have a smiley key. we just continue to use the tool we've had all this time, fitting our new language (the emoticons) to the keyboard, rather than the other way around.

im no chomsky, but i figure that languages in general surely develop/ed like this: largely using old words and grammar structures in artful ways to convey evolving thoughts and systems, rather than creating new words and structures - thereby accumulating inefficiencies and idiosyncracies.

i mean, we all intuitively know this, but nothing had ever crystallized it for me before. thanks smiley!