Oh, how I adore the intricacies & bemusements of language (especially the delightful absurdities & brilliant abundances of my own); how I do truly love the foreplay & the interplay and the play-by-play of words — the way in which we humans can string together an otherwise garbled mass of sounds — guttural moans & subtle screeches & staccato syllables — to somehow convey our thoughts or our desires or our fears or our hopes to another … How utterly amazing this capability is to me, and what a great gift we have been given therein! And yet in this day and age of texting & tweeting — in these times of distance & diminishment where our “intimacy” consists primarily of gazing often somberly into the smallest of video screens, I have found myself mourning the loss of language.

Though by my own account no wordsmith by any means, I find myself deploring the wayward direction our species is headed — especially regarding the ways we now “communicate” with one another.  And whereto, I often wonder?  Towards a most perilous cliff where, once plummeted over, we will solely speak to one another with silent clicks on a keyboard? — or where eye-contact becomes a jail-able offense? — or where actually speaking to one another is considered a sign of insanity?  Such thoughts do not plague me often, and yet tax me on occasion they do still … And then along comes someone like Stephen Fry — a devout & veritable “Guardian of the Language”; so much so that merely listening to him becomes an act of reverence — a glorious renewal in my faith that the Beauty that is the English language indeed will never fully die.

 

 

Filed under: Practical Tips for Peace-full Living by Scaughdt