THE MUTATING OF LANGUAGE

It comes as no surprise that everyone and everything is becoming harder to understand.  Commercials call commonplace things by new and absurd names. How about the Magic Bullet which is actually a blender?. How about a mood moderator which is actually an anti depressant?  The spectrum of morphing language is all around us.  We don’t like unpleasant terms, so we create new easy-to-handle ones.  For instance, the person who will absolutely make sure you don’t get a refund is the “refund” manager.  The front of house” manager in the theatre you attend does nothing but tell you to be quiet, and not to take pictures. We call the Internet the Information Highway because, like a highway you go through all sorts of places you would avoid if it were just a plain old road. The equivalent of rusted out diners (old information), overpriced little stores (online boutiques), crazy local eccentrics (personal blogs), and the weird little local newspaper you are subjected to where the news is old, the punctuation is bad. The articles are insanely opinionated and scribed by the person who knows the least about pretty much anything (The Drudge Report).

Communication is now an anathema.  Communication itself has ceased to mean communication. If frequently denotes fact bashing, scripted, unspontaneous interaction, and in the corporate world really stands for “ah, we can’t say that, so let’s say this instead”.

Words, ideas and one-on-one  dialogues are now just strangely unacceptable if they are not part of a repetitive, blanched out invective. Is there any one in the world who does not know what a reality show is? It is a scripted byte of unreality that we watch, emulate or include in our our daily living. Everything is a “reveal”. When someone gets girded up, has new teeth lasered onto their old teeth or are completely taken apart and sewn back up like a broad stitch teddy bear – this, in modern non-language is a reveal. Reveal means “shock you to death” with the conversion of a person, room, vehicle or other item into something else.  On a car makeover show, over zealous customizing and mechanic personnel take perfectly plain vehicles and turn them into mobile, flashy eyesores with every accessory, appliance and luxury a WalMart boasts.

Our language is devolving into a skit.  The skit is that the further we get from plain language, the closer we get to a comic book culture where meaning has no meaning and syntax and vernacular as frames of reference disappear completely.  We truly need to feel sorry for someone who learned to speak English somewhere else. Somewhere where real language was taught. These people have walked into the world of the new language. They may be distraught and confused, but at least they can dodge the Magic Bullet. After all, now it’s a blender and nothing lethal at all.