Oh Those Wacky Brits

Leave it to the Brits to come up with a study showing emails to be more damaging to IQ than smoking pot. Apparently some crack team of British researchers has found that workers who over-actively check their email lose on average 10 points of IQ during the course of their workday. They contrasted this with the mere 4 point drop experienced immediately after smoking marijuana, and voila! We now have a new study, helpfully telling us something we probably all already knew in the first place.

You can’t really be too surprised that the Brits would take on such an important social issue as this one though. After all, it was the ever-perceptive Britons who spared no expense to be able to announce to the world first, and I know for a fact that there was stiff competition from a group of drunk Germans to be first to publish, unfortunately the Germans were waylaid at a tattoo parlor on their way to mail off their findings, seems a likeness of Underdog was found in the shop's window, and we all know how rare that is, but I may be moving away from my original point now, namely, that drinking beer made people seem more attractive.

I personally have conducted this same research on numerous occasions, without the benefit of any grant money being thrown my way, and would concur that most Brits become positively tolerable to look at once I’ve had a pint or two. Back to the Brits latest contribution to the academic world, I think we're all well aware of the fact that emails are making us dumber.

Do me a favor. Take a random email message in your inbox, copy and paste it into any word processing program that checks the grade level of the writing, and I'm sure you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. Now it could be said that many people view email as equivalent to an oral conversation, and therefore write in a more relaxed style than they would, say, a doctoral dissertation, or a study on, oh I don’t know, maybe emails and pot.

The fact of the matter is that while speaking like an idiot has always been socially acceptable, and in my opinion should continue to be, I'm a big fan of the whole not thinking too much about what you say before you say it system of conversations, as anyone who has ever had the unfortunate privilege of speaking to me can attest, writing in the style of a ten year old was once frowned upon. Those enlightened times are long gone. I would go so far as to say that these days, the vast majority of what people read and write consists of fragmented thoughts, incorrectly constructed quasi-sentences, and simplistically stated, low-brow, pathetic tripe.

Of course, this trend is upsetting to practically no one you meet, as most of the people you meet don’t want to write well in the first place, and in the second place, probably prefer the illiterate society that we are cooperatively creating. So Brits, jolly good show mates! My question to you is what are you planning to do with your findings?

I know that personally, I expect any emails received from the land of the Sex Pistols and spotted dick, to, from this day forth, be as well organized, thoughtfully constructed and intellectually stimulating as the rest of their contributions to the world of letters have been. And yes, here I’m thinking specifically of Benny Hill and Rowan Atkinson.