I was reading some news from the UK today and it struck me how lucky that nation is to be so enriched with citizens bringing ideas and culture from so many parts of the world. It’s how the world grows, how it’s supposed to grow.
I know there are many who deplore the changes to their traditional idea of their country, who mourn for the loss of uncontested values and beliefs, and I understand their resistance. They are so deeply attached to their histories and what they see and feel as their past glories; they don’t want to accept that those things that live in their hearts belong to the past, and maybe would not be very glorious by modern understandings. Love of parents and grandparents does not have to entail love of everything they believed and fought for.
I feel that way about certain changes in language that upset me every time I’m reminded that that’s how a living language works. I believe that language is for communication and I distrust every change that, to my mind, actually limits or confuses or interferes with the easy flow of communication. Language is, in a sense, my country, my allegiance, and some of the modern shifts frustrate and even anger me.
But I don’t have the right to insist everyone use that Oxford Comma, that no one can use words that actually, originally mean their opposites. I could make a fuss about the use of ‘I’ when used as an object, but it’s a losing battle. So all I can do is say a silent “Thank you!” when a writer properly places a comma after or before the name of the person being addressed, or when a speaker uses ‘me’ where the appropriate plural would be ‘us.’ I appreciate that sweet moment of connection with another citizen of the country of Language.
It would be a wonderful, beneficial thing if all of us who cling to a past that will never come again could come to this understanding: To stress over the inevitable changes nothing while making one’s own life harder. Choosing battles comes into this of course, and the decision of what is ‘inevitable’ and what simply isn’t, and what is worth fighting for.
What’s going on in the United States at the moment is a prime example of resisting the changes desired by a small but profoundly self-interested, non-ethical, immoral cabal who have all the power money can buy. That is the only power they are considering in their hostile takeover of the US, and that, of course, is why, soon or late, they will fail.
Sometimes, resistance to change is not so much about values and traditions of the heart. Sometimes it is just about not wanting to have to relearn how to work with the world. I spent the years of childhood learning how the world works, what to expect from my own attitudes and interactions with it. I learned how to type on the qwerty keyboard, I learned how to use the technology I grew up with. I accepted the better conveniences of so many technological innovations that came along…
But they have kept on coming way past the point where any ‘convenience’ they introduced was much outweighed by the burdens of forgetting the old and learning a whole new system–especially those dependent on muscle-memory. It is distressing when nothing anymore has permanence.
It still does not give me any right to insist that no one should be allowed to surf into the future on the oversized flat screen of their desire.
LOOSELY SPEAKING... 