Webster’s Frankenstein

     This is a guest post by a friend of mine, a little bit different style than myself but the insights are funny.

     

     It is my first obligation to thank my dear friend, Ben, for inviting me to guest write on his blog, which I have found to be as scathing, clever, and unblinkingly logical as the man himself. Despite the fact that Ben stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the validity of my revolutionary philosophies (i.e. Canadians are simply Americans without guns; Zero divided by zero is equal to one; Obama is in truth an android sent by an interstellar race of socialist weasels to pave the way for future invasion, etc…), I have always been well acquainted with his quick wit, staunch character, and relentless need to observe and understand his environment- qualities which never cease to remain in great demand and in low supply. It is also true that we endured a particularly horrific brand of hell together, for which I daresay we are bonded for life.

            But I seriously doubt I was invited to write for Ben’s blog to boost his ego. I’m sure it’s healthy enough as it is. So allow me to present to you a scene which occurs far, far in the future. In this distant age, electronics have replaced writing and speech, becoming the only avenue of human communication. As such, John Doe texts his brother Jacob to inform him of some bad news:

            “OMFG dood mom got canser :( docter ses she only got a yeer if ur in town soon u gotta com see her”

            As you can see, punctuation, sentence structure, grammar, spelling- all are utterly obsolete in America’s future. This might be a stretch for the brain to imagine, except that this distant future is set to arrive in the spring of 2012, when our newest batch of high school seniors will be graduating. That’s right, the verbal SAT scores are the lowest they have been since 1972, the earliest recorded year available for comparison. The same year, mind you, that the hysterical post-hippie drug binge depicted in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was printed.

            What happened? It would be understandable (and partly justifiable) to point the finger at the legislative abomination, the “No Child Left Behind Act.” And yet, this would ignore the revolution which has been growing beneath our noses so quickly that Vladimir Lenin would hang himself in humiliation. It’s called technology, otherwise known as the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.

            Now, understand, I’m a bit of an elitist when it comes to language. I am meticulous, perhaps even obsessive about using correct, appropriately punctuated sentences when texting or emailing. As such, I seethe in hatred when I see “OMG” or “lol!” glaring up at me from the screen of my phone. I’m the guy who ridicules his friends for using “your” when they should have used “you’re.” But this problem goes far beyond that: you are lucky to even get the y and the o before the u these days. This tech-language is fostered on Facebook, on World of Warcraft, on just about every teenage phone throughout the country. And it is the process by which smart people (the guys who engineer the technology) have lobotomized America’s teenagers, whose minds are already swimming in hormones and inferior intellect as it is. It is no coincidence, then, that a 21st century population of vegetables is butchering a test written and coordinated by a 20th century population of humans.

            The aforementioned vegetables will soon be flooding the universities, where, no doubt, their papers will return to them soggy with red ink. But at this point, nothing can be done to stem the damage being done to the English language. Young people are not graded on the correctness of their text messages and status updates. Left to themselves they will revel gleefully in their shared stupidity; their very DNA will degrade upon realizing it no longer serves a human host- DNA that will inevitably be passed on to increasingly tragic children. When our more fortunate generation dies off, these poor fools will populate Congress, practice medicine, and manage the economy.

This is, for all intents and purposes, the end of civilization as we know it.

For language is not just communication, it is the medium through which we exchange ideas, cooperate, and express vision. It is, on any account, the means by which we think. Of course, language changes forms. It is after all, highly unlikely that we would be able to carry much of a conversation with the men who penned “Hamlet” or the Declaration of Independence, but we can all agree that they were intelligent men who possessed brains. When that brain is a hive of radiowave induced tumors, however, when that brain descends mindlessly into recitation of binary code and incoherent slop, I’m sure Darwin will be not far off with his iPad, tweeting “wtf guys! the end is really really close!”