"...A Few Words About Even Fewer Words..."

Time for today's verbosity on vocabulary.

With a little value added alliteration attached.

It strikes me as, at least, poignant and, at most, tragic that in a culture that has evolved from face to face interaction to top of head to top of head interaction (you have to picture two people texting each other in the same room and the visual will come to you in a flash), our "communication" with one another seems to be increasing....while our skill with the language seems to headed south for the winter...and all other seasons.

Admittedly, I come into this discussion with an obvious prejudice.

I love words.

And the ability that the human being has to use them.

And, to paraphrase Olympia Dukakis in "Steel Magnolias", the spoken word, and our ability to accessorize, are the only things that seperate us from the animals.

But in that wacky, zany way that life has of zigging when we're anticipating zagging, our vocabulary skills seem to be more about waneing than they are accretion.

Say what?

Say huh?

The deterioration of our vocabularies stems, in some part, at least, I think, from the increase in our impatience.

Another of those delicious life ironies.

The faster things move, the quicker machines get us there, the faster and quicker we want them to move and go.

Give us patience...and give it to us right now.

Then, there's textspeak.

LOL

OMG

IKR

etc.

And yet another life's impish ironics.

LOL is the radically truncated acronym for "laugh out loud". Yet, shortened though it may be, it could be shortened even more.

By not using it at all.

Because it's superfluous.

If something is funny to someone, you shouldn't have to add LOL to it. If something is not funny and you add LOL to it, you just look stupid.

That's for outgoing, by the way.

Incoming responses could theoretically consist of LOL.

But again, since your sender is not in the room to hear your LOL, it seems a little contrived.

IKR

Speaking of....when did it become necessary to ask for affirmation of everything we observe/regard and/or comment upon?

IKR is the radically truncated acronym for "I know...right?" which is one of those things that seems to intimate camaraderie but really just comes off as needy.

"I know...you agree with me when I say that I know, correct?"

And let's not even get started on punctuation.

Most of the grandkids don't use what seems to be an obviously necessary question mark at the end of the IKR.

It's just ikr.

Well, wouldn't that sound like....

"I know....right."

Which is either very presumptuous, not just a tad superior and/or a whole lot of redundant.

And I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking...

ikr

OMG.

It's enough to make you want to LOL.

Word.