To think of a whole generations whose fixation on texting abbreviated words to their homies never looking up to understand the world around them or even converse with anyone except their small circle of small vocabularies.

Or those that listen to the founding insults of hip-hop or the teenybopper lovesick solitude song with no melody but words pumped out by the market machine artists with a brand to sell.

A wonderful allegory for the watering down and commercializing almost everything. Fortunately, there are artists who can break through all that mumbo-jumbo with some wonderful new songs like, I'm a Creep or Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.

Ron

Indeed, we have the means of communications that takes place almost at the speed of light, and yet we have precious little of the words at our disposal, much less the ideas, to form the substance of our communication. Social media has gone a long way to neutralizing any true forms of meaningful communication.

OMG! Those three letters are not my generation’s explicative, but of my children’s era. I use them because this piece got my stark attention. I wish my English teaching mother was alive to read this!! It is a stellar presentation about verbage, about expression, about the state of civilization in this contemporary, extemporary time. I sponged up these lines, having felt exactly this way for a very long time. Vocabulary. A Pandora’s box of thought jewels. Intelligence banquet. Symphony of imagination and intrigue. I’m sharing this one with my brother, his also having been a high school English teacher.



This topic has been simmering on the front burner of my stove for over three decades now {likely because of my family of teachers} such that today’s ‘speed-talk’ and ‘fad-talk’ rankles my listening ability and I find myself saying aloud to the TV “For cripes’ sake can you think of NO other words than these thread-bare, rubber-stamped, silly putty, empty-toolbox trite-ities?” i.e. - ‘unpresidented.’. Anyone who knows me would think I must be intoxicated, but I gave up alcohol three years ago. So you see here how monumentally I treasure reading your articulated embellishments and bodacious tapestry depicting ‘Lexiconic Starvation’.


Footnote: Need to change the last line’s ‘with’ to ‘who.’ I HONOR your delivery of this magnificent observance and assessment, Odin. A+++++ ~~ djl