(MIS)HEARING ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE: THE VENIAL DESOLATION OF SOUND(S)

Résumé

Speakers of a kaleidoscopic myriad of equally mystifying and mesmerizing languages across the board have done battle since time immemorial over the notions of clarity and precision of the 'spoken' output generated by dint of an either preferred or accessible linguistic mechanism. It comes as no surprise that the bone of contention is yet to be buried with the ever-deepening and widening margin of diparity neither taken in good part nor always seen as a 'licenced' variant. Despite the ostensible cline to greater permissiveness, a recrudescence of deepseated strait-laced prejudices can be observed while novel forms of communication are often dismissed as substandard and consigned to a peripheralised state of inescapable inexactitude. The small-scale survey at hand takes a dive into the cognitive arenas of pervasive social media for the two-fold sake – mining a germane corpus and acquiring the toolkit to decipher novel semantic subsystems. The next port of call is a closer look at the backlash from academia and other 'authorised' communities, all the while keeping an eye out for reasonably sound grounds to justify these revitalised tendencies towards what, for a time, seemed an antiquated and obsolete convention. Use is made of the concepts pertaining to confirmation bias, heterophemy and more broadly why we mishear or choose to mishear each other ever so often.