a twenty ninth story...'language, in short'

Dog: Woof!

Cat: ____

Dog: Woof! Woof! Woof!

Cat: ____

Dog: Grrrrrrrrrrr!

Cat: ????

Dog: Woof!

And there you have it.  This short screen play underlines the importance of LANGUAGE – hands down the greatest invention in human creation!  People talk of the Wheel, the Microchip, Anesthetic, Antibiotics, the Printing Press, but without language none of these would have been possible.  Language has helped  humans collaborate and enabled a meeting of minds throughout our history as a species; this in turn has led to what determinists like to call ‘progress’ (at least in between the times we’ve been blowing each other up). 

Homosapiens uber alles!  

~

Consider this: in the aforementioned screen play you could have easily substituted the dog and the cat with our cromagnon ancestors before they learned to pronounce their vowels.  And on the subject of vowels, I sometimes wonder whether Progressive Homosapiens such as you and I are, in fact, in regression. 

The evidence: text speak and acronyms.  TBH, I am concerned, and IMHO, so should you be.

(:-<)

We spend our lives running from pillar to post in lunatic fashion, and – this is meant to be a rhetorical question – why should we bother with elocution when we can communicate with each other using four letters as opposed to four whole words!!?  Take it from me, we just have to. 

Here’s an idea: we are ‘time poor’, we remain obstinate or unaware of the future (tomorrow will come around if we’re not careful) and IAF (‘in all fairness’ – my small contribution to 21^st century prose) we have our priorities in the wrong order.

~

My grandson has an iPad.  He is three years old.  Babysitting him is the easiest job in the world.  The iPad babysits my grandson for me, while I watch old re-runs of Super Bowl!  He sits passively on the shag pile carpet, presses coloured buttons and listens to voice activated commands.  I watch him waiting for an outburst that never comes and wonder how his neural signals are working.  My main source of wonderment is whether my grandson is reading the (few) written words displayed on his plasma screen or simply listening to them.  Are the words and sentences being formed in his brain being formed by him, or on his behalf by the machine?! 

(:-\)

Then, at some point in the evening, my daughter returns with her husband from wherever they have been. 

By the way, my daughter is a graduate of Oxford University, she majored in English literature.  She has brains! 

Hastily I switch off Super Bowl and start making meaningless chit chat with my grandson, something along the lines of the screen play involving the dog and the cat and with much the same outcome, i.e. not very much of one.  My daughter walks into the living room and says ‘hello’ before picking my grandson up in her arms.  I ask where they have been.  My daughter tells me they have been to see The Tempest by William Shakespeare, the Godfather of Modern English.  ‘Was it good?’, I ask. My daughter says it was, although the theatre was half empty.  ‘Why?’ I ask once more. 

Here, another rhetorical question.

~

Shakespeare is the Greatest Story Teller Since Aesop.  True.  Then again his plays can appear on first reading, rather complicated in their language.  I would agree with people who say he is not the easiest playwright to get along with, but then should something a little complicated spoil our enjoyment, or turn us off altogether?! In our schools nowadays Shakespeare’s works are being reduced to a series of comic strips.  Because it’s more straightforward.  Hey teacher!

Meanwhile, the growing apathy towards Shakespeare suggests a society falling out of love with our Greatest Invention: 

‘For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.’

Sonnet twenty-nine, FYI.  Take note!

Or, Nota Bene!!

(as a quick aside I performed an internet search using the internet search provider who’s brand name recently became Generic Noun and Verb in our English dictionary, and found pages and pages of people asking for the translation of N.B.  An acronym a generation of technological determinists didn’t understand!).

~

To extrapolate the point I make with regard to Nota Bene, Latin is widely considered a dead language these days.  Even fifty years ago my Latin class was a mere seven or eight people out of perhaps two hundred in my school year.  No one speaks it anymore, no one can pronounce their vowels! 

As a consequence acronyms from Latin times have become hard for some of us to understand.  Surely language in the fullest sense has to remain if our abbreviations in our expression are going to continue to mean something.  Living in a ‘modern’ culture (by now you must realise I am an ardent post-structuralist) we rely heavily on abbreviations in everyday comms (!).  IF ‘modern’ forms of abbreviation become the dominant form of expression, there is a danger we’ll be misunderstanding each other in the future, IF the richness and diversity of our language is suppressed.

WTF!

So before your next text message arrives, allow me to leave you with the first line from a version of an old joke, understood for hundreds of years, and perhaps consider it something of a rhetorical premonition:

‘How many cats and dogs does it take to change a light bulb?’

(;-)