Mark Twain once said that the difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. Sometimes I struggle to find the right words, especially in awkward or emotionally charged situations. I'm terrible at expressing the correct sentiment toward someone who has lost a loved one. I speak in cliches at weddings and in maternity wards. Lofty vocabulary, if I could even summon the means to express it, would be more than useless. It would be pretentious.
So there's that.
Then there's the person forever without words. There are those incapable of summoning any vocabulary for any occasion. They speak primarily in verbal pauses with occasional emotional interjections and trite platitudes. If a court reporter were to transcribe the conversations of chatty teenagers, professional athletes, reality stars, or rappers, he might fill page after page with likes, you knows, ums, uhs, you know what I'm sayings, and non-witticisms such as we got to take it to the next level or everything that happens, happens for a reason. The more sophisticated transcriptions might include something about empowering women (more on this to come) or putting oneself back out there, which will be no more than 7 words away from finding closure. Supposing the court reporter were accompanied by a sketch artist, the sketches would reveal honest expressions. The platitude dispenser doesn't have a disingenuous bone in her body. She firmly believes that um, you know, you were just, like, never there for me is a unique and convincing summation of 15 years of marital woe. There's not a hint of irony in that statement, for irony might require additional words for her to deconstruct the platitude, not to mention the concept of irony itself.
I've always thought of this phenomenon as a form of illiteracy, but I'm beginning to think it goes deeper than that. Perhaps it's not a scarcity of words but a scarcity of ideas. Are people becoming less and less capable of expressing ideas, not because they lack the words to express them, but because they lack the ideas themselves. Are we living in an idea-deficient age?
I agree with your observation. In my experience I’ve found that not only do people speak in platitudes but they get stuck on them. I have an ex-girlfriend that I’ve heard say at least five hundred times that she wanted to be “on the same page”. And I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard her say she wanted good people, places or things “In [her] arena”. If I had those dollars, I wouldn’t have to work this week. And now that you’ve brought it to my attention, I think I do recognize a lack of ideas. Not only that but a lack of variety as far as feelings go. Maybe certain segments of the population have become so shallow that they don’t need additional vocabulary to describe they really aren’t feeling.
ReplyDelete