Questions and Responses – The First Two

 At the prompting of myself, a great friend sent me some questions of his origination. The hope was that I’d write: I did. And I’m titling these thoughts, originally enough, “Questions and Responses,” but you know that already.

Q: What is the potential for re-purposing or redesigning phrases that used to have a basis in reality, but that reality has faded away? For example, in this e-mail, I can CC or BCC someone. The CC stands for Carbon Copy, but carbon copy machines are long gone. What will this do to language?

R: The potential has been actualized, right? When phrases become re-purposed, they’re stripped of the initial meaning–as the reality in which the phrase was borne has also been stripped from the speaker. A replacement of meaning isn’t necessarily a danger; it just upsets the literal-minded curmudgeon, like myself. My favorite semi-example of this comes from the everyday speech of every cellphone user when one explains how he’ll “text you” later. That’s a slightly diguised noun, acting as a verb. But who cares? As long as points are being made, and thoughts communicated.

However, I do think there is a potential danger with a correlative problem. Though I’ve never read 1984, I know of Newspeak–defined here by Wikipedia: “the deliberately impoverished language promoted by state.” Media saturation has purged our speech of nuanced language, and with the extraction comes the loss of an ability to articulate big ideas. There is also a transference of meaning (of which your question spoke) or an overall reductive revision of our language: the vocabulary is shrinking, but ideas are not, leaving less words to bear more meaning. In an attempt to explain, I’ll cite the old joke/observation of the word “cool”: this word, in a not insignificant amount of speakers’ vocabularies, has been infused with every bit of positive meaning from complete indifference to the infinity of goodness (only vocal inflections–or worse, exclamation points– can be relied on for a somewhat nuanced meaning). With all of us audience to the same language–the language spoken by our televisions and radios and every other medium of communication–we forfeit words as they become antiquated by non-use. This is what makes 19th-Century novels or Faulkner difficult to read. There is a loss of words; I just hope we aren’t in turn losing ideas.

Q: Describe a super power that no one has ever had.

R: Super. Powerful. Singular. Incomparable.

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