What happened to words?

"It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." -Macbeth




I'm thinking about the mutability of words. How certain words, in and of themselves innocuous, can shift over time to either be reduced to almost meaninglessness or take on new nuances that were never intended. A lot of that is due to media over-hype and advertising blasts, I think. 

  • New and Improved
  • Breaking News
  • Unprecedented

...the list goes on and on, and the language is never re-energized. It is, instead, deflated, smashed flat, rendered out to a sort of overly-crisped and burnt bit of something that we might have enjoyed once-- like much-overdone bacon. 

And here I sit, a minor wordsmith, a poet and essayist, and I am more than frustrated with this contraction of language. Did you know that Shakespeare invented or popularized about 1700 words in the English language? And we are shrunk to emojis, slang (slang is already slang-- short language), and overly-repeated phrases. 

It's maddening. Check out the social media flood of mis-spelled, poorly written, all-caps dreck and you'll see what I mean. 

Yet here I am, on social media, bitching about the misuse of a major world language. Especially the abuse of the language by people who should know better (or if they don't, they should move to the shoulder and let the rest of us stream on by). 

The satiric posts flowing out of Gavin Newsome's office lately really highlight just how awful things have become, not just politically, but linguistically. If the purported world leader who posts from his potty in the middle of the night can't spell, can't stop yelling in capital letters, can't formulate a cogent sentence, then where are we? The answer is not to cut the Department of Education and to gut good teaching, let me tell you. 

Okay, rant over for now. Have a good day, and I'll try not to lose my noodles over this too often.

C

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