You
know it’s time for a new phone when it starts calling people randomly.
They call this “pocket-dialing,” or “butt-dialing” depending on
how close you like to keep your device to your derriere. Mine does it
so often, it’s clear that this five-dollar Tracfone contraption is
slipping into the electronic equivalent of old-age dementia. It happened
most recently on a jaunt through Portland’s Monument
Square; I dug it out and noticed it was in mid-call with a mysterious
“someone.”
“Someone” texted me minutes later: “Who is this? I just missed a call from this number.”
A reasonable question. “This is Jeff,” I texted back. “Sorry, I must have pocket-dialed you by mistake.”
“Oh,” was the reply. “Well I don’t know you.”
Yeesh. “Someone” likes to cut right to the meat of it.
At
least that was the impression. But that’s the fundamental problem with
texts: Since the point is to bang them out quickly, you don’t have
time to do any real “writing.” In other words, you don’t sit there
tweaking the language so that everything has tone and context. “Well I
don’t know you” seems like a terse statement, but maybe it wasn’t
intended that way. Given the limitations of the format,
there’s no real way to tell.
Emoticons
and emojis are an attempt to address this. In case you’ve spent the
past several years making spearheads out of rocks in a South
American jungle, emoticons are facial expressions you make using the
symbols on your keypad; “:-)” is a smiley face, “:-(“ is a frowny face,
and “:-O” means you’ve just walked in on two grizzly bears making love
in a subway terminal. Emojis are the next phase
of this unholy evolution, replacing the keyboard symbols with simple
graphics, apparently to save users the trouble of typing in three whole
keys with the shift button down. I mean heck, we’re not athletes, right?
I
get why these symbols exist. Without them, a lot of these messages
would lack emphasis, and we, the recipients, would be left squinting
at our screens to tease out the authors’ intent. They’ve become a sad
necessity in a world that values pictures over words, cartoons over
language. In the battle for self-expression, composing our thoughts is
losing out to yellow faces giving thumbs-up gestures
and winking in creepy fashion, like high-powered Wall Street shakers or
construction site chauvinists. We’re losing our narrative.
Surely
the pace of modern life has something to do with this. Our days are
packed with details, most of them small, but all vying for snatches
of our time -- emails, texts, calls, Facebook posts, archery practice
and ear hair grooming among them. (Some are more specific to our lives
than others.) As a people, we no longer have the luxury to lick the tips
of our quill pens and scribble out eloquent
missives to friends and relatives. In the early days of this country, a
relatively short 200-plus years ago, “Well I don’t know you” would have
been written as, “I admit I am altogether unfamiliar with your
personage, so please forgive my inability to ascertain
your identity.” Wordier, but if John Adams had written it, he surely
wouldn’t have felt the need to draw a cartoon of a man shrugging his
shoulders in confusion. He also wouldn’t have been butt-dialed from a
cell phone, but you see what I’m driving at.
Not
that there’s anything wrong with expedience, per se, but when
abbreviations, colloquialisms and general informality infiltrate the
common
vernacular, it spells doom for the language. It cripples our ability to
effectively communicate ideas. To illustrate this, let’s contrast
public statements from two disparate political figures -- one from the
19th century, and one from the 21st. In 1863, during
the height of the Civil War, the Union suffered heavy losses at the
Battle of Gettysburg, spurring a patriotic resurgence that would
ultimately lead to victory. Shortly after the battle, on the field where
scores had been slain, President Abraham Lincoln delivered
one of the most eloquent and stirring speeches in American history. He
said, in part:
“(I)n a larger sense, we cannot dedicate -- we can not
consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living
and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor
power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember
what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for
us the living, rather, to be dedicated here
to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so
nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great
task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take
increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the
last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these
dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall
have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the
people, for the people, shall not perish
from the earth.”
Now
here’s a 2006 quote from Donald Trump: “Rosie O’Donnell’s disgusting
both inside and out. You take a look at her, she’s a slob. … I mean
she’s basically a disaster.”
I’m not saying our texting culture was directly responsible for this pitiful linguistic decline. But it didn’t help.
If
language is how we communicate, then our very ability to exchange
thoughts and ideas is in jeopardy. Brevity has its place, but sometimes
more is needed. If the trend continues, there may come a day when we
encounter a texting, smiley-face-sending millennial, utter to them a
sentence containing more than five words, and watch in disappointment as
their attention span turns to dandelion spores,
scattered by the faintest breeze.
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