In Defense of a Divine Gift
I promised myself, when I started this a few days ago, I would write something every day for thirty days.
I woke up, this morning, took care of the zoo, poured myself 26 oz. of Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi© into my 32 oz., plastic, Alabama Football cup (six ice cubes of about 1 oz. each), and sat down at my keyboard and my brain blanked. I had nothing to write about.
Oh, sure, I could find some political something to get all worked up about, but I would like this blog to not be entirely political.So ... what's a poor, down-on-his-ideas, writer to write about? I've done "hard news". I thrive on op/ed stuff. I've written speeches (for other people). I tried to write a novel, but I have very little imagination and, what I was writing was not a very original idea since someone else wrote a screen play that was the same idea and the movie got made (Shout out to "Rock Star" ).
I was struggling for ideas, here.
Then, - like the first fly ball I camped out under in the outfield in Little League that kept appearing to get closer and closer - suddenly, it hit me!
I cyber-meandered over to a certain social media site (They're not paying me. No free advertising.) to see what my friends were doing on their time lines.
One of my friends had posted a meme that was misspelled. I HATE that! I have a mild case of CDO (Like O.C.D. only alphabetical, like it should be). So, I messaged her and through the course of our "conversation", I offered to fix the offending graphic.
As I worked on it (it didn't take long), my mind began to wander to how much I detest misspellings because, usually, it's not a matter of lack of intelligence, it's a matter of laziness. True enough, there's no "spell checker", when you're making a meme, but read it over, people!
As I worked, my mind began to wander and it occurred to me that the reason things like that bothered me so much is because I love languages. Not only do I know how to speak a few, but I study etymology of words in them. It's not good enough for me to know a word or (especially) an idiomatic expression. I need to know how that expression came into use.
Aha! I have my topic! Eureka! The English language.
As a lover of the language, I have many issues with what has been happening to it. The advent of 140 or 160 character limits have caused people to get creative. I despise it.
Nothing irks me more than seeing someone who's educated or just plain knows better sending me things like: "How r u doin i herd ur a little sick". Grrrrrr! And don't even get me started about when an elected official does it. It's not "cool" or "hip". It's ignorant.
I've always hated texting with the heat of 1,000 super novas; not entirely for the reason I've laid out, but that is a big part of it. In fact, just about anyone that knows me, even a little bit has heard me say: "If you have time to text, you have time to call." That being said, I do tolerate the behavior, but I have actually stopped replying to "txt spk" messages.
Now, I come to my plea: Can we please just be a little bit more on top of things, when we use our divine gift of communication? You don't believe it's a divine gift? Why do you think the framers specifically enumerated that particular right in our constitution? Can we just show a little homage to the vehicle that helps us get (and maintain) jobs, keeps us in touch with loved ones when we're far from home and a cell phone isn't readily available, allows us to form our children into the good citizens we want them to be?
Language and the ability to communicate is so important to the very foundations of society. Without it, where would we be? Back in the trees. That's where.
- Michael
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