George Orwell wrote that as the language goes, so goes the culture. He warns of two signs of trouble--the loss of vocabulary and the twisting of language to conceal rather than reveal truth. We are far gone in both. You refer in your reply to the corrupt use of language to lie and reverse real meaning. But underneath that is what tec…
George Orwell wrote that as the language goes, so goes the culture. He warns of two signs of trouble--the loss of vocabulary and the twisting of language to conceal rather than reveal truth. We are far gone in both. You refer in your reply to the corrupt use of language to lie and reverse real meaning. But underneath that is what technology has done. It has created an entire generation who no longer communicate in words, let alone sentences. IMHO and LOL aren't words. We have literally lost, and continue to lose vocabulary, and the only thing we have to think with are words. If I don't have the words, I can't formulate the thought. Simple as that. We cannot think something if we can't name it. We can have feelings, emotions, but not ideas, and without the words, we don't know what the feelings are. The Dark Ages loom. As a teacher of literature who took joy for many years in watching students read a play or a novel, discuss it in the first move toward understanding, and finally sit down to wrestle with words, use the Thesaurus to find more words, and then to write essays that used those words to further clarify and enrich their ideas, I find this terrifying. It is the great dumbing-down of America and it's been going on for a long time. It has picked up speed with the juggernaut of money, power, and the extremists among the religionists.
George Orwell wrote that as the language goes, so goes the culture. He warns of two signs of trouble--the loss of vocabulary and the twisting of language to conceal rather than reveal truth. We are far gone in both. You refer in your reply to the corrupt use of language to lie and reverse real meaning. But underneath that is what technology has done. It has created an entire generation who no longer communicate in words, let alone sentences. IMHO and LOL aren't words. We have literally lost, and continue to lose vocabulary, and the only thing we have to think with are words. If I don't have the words, I can't formulate the thought. Simple as that. We cannot think something if we can't name it. We can have feelings, emotions, but not ideas, and without the words, we don't know what the feelings are. The Dark Ages loom. As a teacher of literature who took joy for many years in watching students read a play or a novel, discuss it in the first move toward understanding, and finally sit down to wrestle with words, use the Thesaurus to find more words, and then to write essays that used those words to further clarify and enrich their ideas, I find this terrifying. It is the great dumbing-down of America and it's been going on for a long time. It has picked up speed with the juggernaut of money, power, and the extremists among the religionists.
And there endeth the First Lesson
Yikes. What a downer of a reply. Apologies.