Once upon a time, words had meaning.
‘Hilarious’ meant something so comical it bordered on insanity, ‘obsessed’ implied pathologic, compulsive behaviours, and if my middle school memory serves me correctly, ‘literally’ meant…literally – otherwise it’d be ‘figuratively’. I’ll save my rant on the bastardisation of important words, like ‘depressed’ or ‘addicted’, which got stripped of all their powerful connotations.
Words are no longer enough on their own: they are now traded for abbreviations, at times even boiled down to a single letter or digit. Entire sentences become emojis while punctuation has been rendered meaningless, obsolete.
Apostrophes have been phased out; exclamation points are shamelessly overused, which completely defeats their purpose. To think of the influence they used to have! One would singlehandedly transform the tone of a sentence.
And when did you last see a semi-colon? I miss them; they’re the perfect intermediate between the breather of a comma and the break of a full-stop.
Question marks managed to retain some power – a question will always remain a question. Yet one doesn’t seem sufficient anymore, and like everything nowadays, it’s over-consumed.
I am no classicist: I was fine whenever the interrobang attempted a comeback. Maybe I didn’t mind it because it never really took off, but still, I could understand where it was coming from: it had a function, therefore inventing it made sense. It was introduced out of modern necessity – not contemporary idiocy and indolence.
I’m aware we no longer speak like Shakespeare used to; I get that language is forever moving and evolving. So why do I feel it’s regressing a little more every day, with every new generation?
Words are beautiful, fragile things that make us human and that will disappear if not cared for.
If words are being replaced by images because we’re too lazy to spell them to communicate, then I worry that they will altogether become redundant in the future. Just like books are vanishing, just like languages die every day.
We can look after our words by using them properly and regularly. Not by butchering them at every opportunity, choosing them at random as long as they’re followed by ‘y’know what I mean’ (because no, I do not ‘know what you mean’ if you make no effort to express yourself correctly).
I hope the future words to enter our vocabulary will be creative and rich in sense, not just dumbed down shortcuts of existing ones. In the meantime, I am determined to keep on employing them the way they were meant to be used: by respecting their definition, meaning and history.
But hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is all just one big linguistic nightmare and when I wake up, ‘LOL’ would’ve disappeared from the dictionary.
BASIC HUMAN WRITES 