I'll Try To Be Brief

…but I probably won’t, due to vestiges from a previous incarnation when loquacity was esteemed. Fewer and fewer words are now the fashion. Adverbs are deemed to be (really, very) superfluous and adjectives are regarded as weak props, from saccharine to ponderous.

When did brevity become such a virtue? Are we a lazy people or just in a hurry to get where we’re going so we can think great thoughts? Is this our way of getting back at long-winded rhetoricians; those bloviators in the halls of Congress or men of the cloth intoning everything God has to say?

The 19th century was a time when working-people became literate. Novels were the rage and many authors got paid by the word. It was also an age of pretension and ornamentation. A well-shaped sentence on the page with a preamble and digressions of a dozen commas and semi-colons, was considered a thing of beauty. The elegantly crafted phrase at the dinner table got you re-invited. Henry James could separate the subject from the predicate with as many words as it took a Minimalist to write a short story. Lincoln’s four minute Gettysburg Address was preceded by Edward Everett’s two hours oration.

Then the pendulum swung after the First World War. Limbs were shot off and sentences got clipped. Romanticism was overthrown along with the monarchies of Europe. Jazz was the staccato to accompany urban speech. Concision entered poetry. Literature became stripped of frippery the same way the Bauhaus School brought Modernism to architecture. Hemingway wrote what must be the world’s shortest novel:

Baby shoes for sale; never used.

Badinage at the dinner table no longer insured a return visit. In fact, that word, itself, hasn’t made the final cut in dictionaries for decades. Public oration is barely tolerated. We’ve discovered the power of the under-statement. Monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon pushed aside polysyllabic Latinate.

Get to the point. Spit it out. Twenty-five words or less. Button your lip..

Brevity shortened our perceptual span, or maybe it was just a better fit. The president of the United States is now POTUS and the State of the Union is SOTU. Some linguists believe that language precedes thought. Fewer words limit ideas. A broad vocabulary trains the mind to think in more nuanced ways. The positive side of all this is that greater demands are expected of the reader or watcher to participate.

Ellipsis is fine but have we not taken it too far, moving beyond brevity to bites, texts, tweets, and duh? If we continue in this trajectory we will end in the place from whence we came; shrugs and grunts.

Abbreviations, Acronyms and Signifiers

It’s bad enough that I don’t know how anything works but I'd like to think I still speak the common tongue and, at least, know what I don’t know.

I was just told what Wi-Fi means. I’d been seeing it all over town but all I knew is that my life hadn’t changed because of my ignorance. Since the sign had appeared in eateries I thought it referred to waffles or some new sushi. And now I know.

Wi- Fi "refers to wireless fidelity; networking technology that allows computers and other devices to communicate over a wireless signal," according to TechTerms. Wi-Fi communication is between the device and a router, which is connected to a modem that provides access to the Internet for connected devices. Wi-Fi is now used in many cell phones and other mobile devices.

I'm glad we've cleared that up.

One sure sign that the world is passing me by is when abbreviations appear and I haven’t the slightest idea what they mean…yet I go for six months or even 65 years faking it. The meaning slowly becomes clear with repeated usage until I get curious enough to Google the derivations.

The most recent one is TMZ. I finally figured out it refers to celebrities but why those letters? And the answer comes up, Thirty Mile Zone, which originated in the 1960's. Due to the growth of on location shoots, studios and various talent guilds established a thirty mile zone, outside of which shooting is considered to be a location shoot, requiring per diems and other travel and living expenses to be paid. The center of the zone was around the old offices of The Association of Motion Pictures and Television Producers, where everything happens. Everything, that is, if you care about that universe….as we must.

The oldest of these is D-Day. I lived through that summer day in 1944 as well as V-J Day. Now that was easy. ..victory over Japan but D-Day always eluded me. Apparently I’ve not been alone.

Many explanations have been given for the meaning of D-Day, June 6, 1944, the day the Allies invaded Normandy from England during World War II. The Army has said that it is an alliteration, as in H-Hour. Others say the first D in the word also stands for day. The French maintain the D means disembarkation, still others say debarkation, and the more poetic insist D-Day is short for day of decision. General Eisenhower said that any amphibious operation has a departed date; therefore the shortened term ‘D-Day’ is used.

Words and signifiers seem to be entering our language with increasing rapidity….and possibly exiting it just as fast. It took me a few years to catch up with bling and wonk. I notice that spell-check still hasn’t admitted the former into its lexicon so I don’t feel too bad about that. I was even late for 24/7.

I’ve finally mastered IMHO, BTW and LOL. We live in global shorthand. I’m glad we’re moving toward universality but we’ve traded away a nuanced vocabulary. I’m reminded of the story about a group of comedians who met regularly and knew each others material so well they numbered the jokes. One fellow stands up and says, 43. Nobody laughed. What’s wrong he asked and was told he didn’t tell it so well.

It’s tough getting old. My impulse is to look backwards into the illusion of historical clarity rather ahead into the dystopia. The present is undecipherable enough. I’m running as fast as I can just to stay still.

Language, That Squishy Thing

It's bad enough to realize you are thinking inside the box, even worse to know that you're not in the loop. Fifty years ago those phrases would have been unintelligible to anyone in the English-speaking world.

Dictionaries are rather stodgy, fat books; before the Internet, that is. Now we have on-line compendiums adding and subtracting words and phrases faster than you can say, No Problem. The old OED or unabridged Merriam-Webster are useful doorstops but are as obsolete as ink eradicator and White-Out.

Am I out of the box and into the loop yet? I doubt it particularly after hearing some of the new language in the Urban Dictionary. There are now about 5.5 million entrees, at the rate of 20,000 submissions per day. Where does an alien go to register?

Some of the recent phrases now in circulation are: That's what B.P. said as in we'll fix it (and bungle the job). Or: Protohype meaning generating buzz about a new product.

Of course we have the option to ignore all this until we suddenly realize we're speaking a different language than our children and need a translator for movies. I’m sure I was a few years late learning what a wuss was or the word bling.

I suppose words must shrivel and wither away to make room for new ones. We can handle only so many. Then again we are a population of many we's. There are those fluent in Trash or Nerd or Highfalutin Academia...and sub-sets for each.

As a living organism Language requires the oxygen of usage. Some words stick and get absorbed while others have a short season. Most new ones enter from the street or ground level; others from cyberspace and a few from the sciences.

Final thought: Our body of language is no more fixed and sacred than our Constitution. The current Conservative stunt to revere the document of our founding fathers is an attempt to make it immutable rather than a living set of precepts subject to interpretation. They would like us to believe the text was divinely inspired and handed down in some Cecil B. DeMille epic.

Language changes because society evolves with new institutions and relationships calling for decision-making unimaginable to those squabbling statesmen of the Enlightenment. Consider how unrecognizable the hummingbird would be to a dinosaur.