“In the beginning was the Word…”
-John 1:1a“I am losing my mind, he thought, one word at a time.”
-The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell“Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.”
I wish it was Witty Brevity or the Art of Being Succinct that was to blame for the fact that the average America teenager now possesses a vocabulary of only about 10,000 words (only 800 of which they actually use in everyday conversation), which is 15,000 less than those poor kids in the fifties were hauling around all day. I read about this tragedy, termed “Verbicide“, recently (and you should too, which is why I linked it…so, go on. I’ll wait here…I’ve got a fat book and a giant bag of Laffy Taffy…really…go on, I’m fine!), and I think it’s a hidden and serious problem. It is an inevitable consequence of a technologically and educationally specialized society that our dictionaries are needing less paper and the English language is de-volving…shrinking into, eh…whatev…
Instead of pursuing a broad liberal-arts education, or occasionally reading an actual…book, young people who attend college today often pursue highly specialized careers that broaden the student’s lexicon only in the areas of technological jargon and scientific terminology, which is fine-I like geek-speek as much as the next person, but there seems to be a needless trade-off. Often students take a freshman English composition classes and many of them find they are hopelessly and completely lost from day one because they were not taught to effectively communicate in high school. In their frustration, they flee all unnecessary Literature and English classes (who wants to waste their time reading all that Shakespearean crap and writing all those stupid papers?) and they take something comparatively easy and potentially profitable like HTML Programming 101. (God knows an British Literature or Art History degree won’t earn a body any actual bank in this economy.) So, a side-effect of our current culture is a verbally handicapped youth. Our language usage is so hobbled and lazy we don’t even bother to utter the ending syllable of our go-to catch-all phraseology anymore. And few people seem bothered by this at all.
Everyone’s just like, “Eh…whatev…”
(That sentence could have been written/tweeted by the majority of today’s youth. Just gives you shuddery feelings all up and down your spine, doesn’t it?)
This is so incredibly sad, because of the underlying frustration that comes from not being able to express oneself in a way that is accurate and honest. It can, and often does, morph into unhealthy non-verbal self-expression that is intended to shock and harm and hurt…both the teen trying to express themselves and those with whom they are trying to communicate. Healthy creative expression dies under the weight of the frustration of the inability to make oneself understood. And, all the poor soul can think to say when they are asked what is happening in their life is the catch-all tagline of adolescent depression:
“Life sucks.”
We need to read. We need to see words. New words. Daily. We need our horizons and our vocabularies broadened on a regular basis. We need to encounter characters and cultures and words and wonders that challenge us and stretch our brains into new directions. We need to be exposed to heart-rending poetry, to stirring hymns, to the timeless classics and the biting satirists. We need to see and use words like apropos and scintillating and resplendent and pontificate and envisage, and know what they mean.
We should be people who actually do envisage things.
Clik here to view.
I can’t decide if this is hilarious or tragic. I’m gonna go with both.
One of the most disturbing things about verbicide is the areas in which language is dying: philosophy, religion, public policy, and nature. These are the arenas of the soul, the deeper regions of the self, and we are starving them on a diet of lolz. And, in a sick twist of educational fate, the language describing sex, violence, recreation, and consumption has increased. The inevitable fallout of this linguistic carnage is all over the internet and in the research papers and SAT essays of today’s students. That zombie apocalypse everybody’s freaking out about is already here…we just don’t realize that all these vacuous Facebookers and are the soul-starved un-dead. Why are so many people content to communicate drivel via a Facebook “share” button (people should have to apply for a license to use that thing. Seriously.) or, with a hundred-forty characters on Twitter if they wanna type something out themselves, and, shoot, why write anything at all when we can go all modern cave-painting and just Instagram our thoughts? How Fun! How modern! How efficient!
(Yes, I hear you. I have a Twitter. It’s a shameless marketing ploy to lure you into my evil corner of the web, and lookie there, it worked. I have an Instagram, too. Mainly because I have a slight addiction to photography. And flowers. I promise never to use the phrase “eh…whatev” if you’ll let me have this little rant and keep them. Please? It’s for the flowers.) Anyway, I think we may be losing something we will have a hard time restoring as our beautiful dictionaries are cleaned out like so many over-stuffed closets.
As for me, I’d like to give my kids as many words as possible, as many options and vehicles to express themselves and be creative and contribute to this world in ways a bit more prolific and significant than “Really…cool.” I’d like for then to actually be able to answer descriptively and honestly the question, “How are you?” and be able to encourage and help them, praise their efforts and strengthen their spirits with the words I use when I reply.