In the basement of the last Furr’s Cafeteria in America, the heads of Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook meet each September 8 with leaders of the two main political parties, presidents of major corporations and advertising agencies, and a rotating cast of foreign enemies and enemy domestic celebrities. Their long-term goal is the eradication of literacy, first in English-speaking countries, eventually throughout the world. After gorging themselves on endangered species, they molest puppies until they turn to formulating the next step in their crusade.
I tend to view conspiracy theories skeptically, this one included. Surely Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg can find snacks more appealing than baby owls. Yet evidence for this theory keeps intruding on my attention.
A couple of years ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook was invited to give the commencement speech at Duke University. His address, composed largely of the time-honored shibboleths beloved of corporate commencement speakers down through the ages, was distinguished by being composed in paragraphs of one sentence each. Reading it was like watching a military parade of clichés, or reading the latest pop business manual. Midway through, Cook urged the graduates to “dare to think different.”
Did he know he was using an adjective where an adverb was required? Was his grammatical error an effort to connect with his audience, or did it amount to a statement that, as one of the winners in the new digital economy, he was above such piddling considerations as using the proper part of speech? Or was it part of something darker and far more pervasive?
I am cursed with an inability to not-listen, and that inability applies to commercial messages. Two months ago I began jotting down examples of the advertising industry’s
assaults on the grammatical concept of parts of speech. A partial list follows:
Safeway delivery is bringing the fresh (adjective as noun)
Change the way you pizza (noun as verb)
However you happy…. (adjective as verb)
Wake up to the wow (interjection as noun)
Enjoy the go (verb as noun)
Let’s put smart to work (adjective as noun)
No matter how you family, it’s better (noun as verb)
No one outPizzas the Hut (noun as verb)
Feed your happy (adjective as noun)
Want to brain better? (noun as verb)
Gift like you mean it (noun as verb)
Let’s give this holiday all the merry we’ve got (adjective as noun)
Get our ap today and fuel better (noun as verb)
Compared with many other languages, English is pretty lightly inflected, depending more heavily on word order than on varied word endings to create meaning. But the elimination of the concept of parts of speech throws remaining inflections out the window, leaving us with such possible sentences as “Grover coked he conk to being unlow,” or “Foot a mile in she walk residue,” which are a bit less ease to interpreting.
I will grudgingly admit that any English speaker can likely interpret the intended meaning of most of these phrases. Some of them are mere elisions: “bringing the fresh” is, in context, clearly implying “the fresh food.” We use such synecdoche all the time. Other phrases require more major reconstruction to make any sense. “Feed your happy,” for example, poses the unanswered question, “happy what?” How do you put an abstract adjective such as “smart” to work?
No problem putting dumb to work, as Google’s headline writer’s demonstrate daily:
Britney Spears Documentary Brings Validity to #FreeBritney Movement, While Putting Misogynistic Media on Blast
There are an insane amount of cool space things happening in 2021
L’Oreal’s New Doodad Sounds Like the Supersmart Skincare Gadget I Need
This Peloton-Beat Saber mashup turns my Oculus Quest into a sweat sponge
Well, I guess if the amount of cool space things is truly insane, then those space things are essentially uncountable, so “amount” is a better choice than “number.” But “amount” is singular and requires a singular verb. So I have to put that headline on blast. Unless one of the cool space things is a New Doodad or a Saber mashup, in which case I’ll just put it on sweat sponge.
Meet Joe Btsflk
Certain portions of the entertainment industry, notably the thoroughly corporatized rap/hip-hop/whatever-is-the-new-brandlabel division, are encouraging a more personalized approach to language destruction, mandating that their weekly new Megastars accept intentionally misspelled and/or unpronounceable names for themselves:
Megan Thee Stallion Posts Photo of Her Gunshot Wound, Makes New Statement
Gigi Hadid On Her Home Birth With Zayn Malik And How They Plan To Raise Daughter Khai In PA
DABABY ARRESTED IN ROBBERY CASE …Victim Doused With Apple Juice
Timothée Chalamet Photobombed Margot Robbie at the Oscars and It Was Perfectly Adorable
Ty Dolla Sign Recruits a Super Team in Kanye West, Fka Twigs and Skrillex For ‘Ego Death’
Lil Jon Refuses to Join Lil Wayne and Lil Pump in Supporting Trump
Lil Pump threatens to leave the U.S. if President Trump isn’t reelected
Cardi B Responds to Claim She’s in a “Mentally Abusive Relationship” With Offset
Makeup guru, influencer Ethanisupreme dead at 17
That I haven’t the faintest notion of who any of these luminaries are, of course, is no blast on them. It just shows that I’m a septuagenarian who hasn’t bothered to keep up with pop culture. After all, Megan Thee Stallion recently appeared on Time’s list of 100 most influential people. And when thee Time sayz you influential, you gotz to be important. I can perhaps be excused my ignorance of Ethanisupreme, since I’ve never been a big consumer of makeup, and I’ve been sort of busy for the past 17 years. Ethanisupreme we hardly knew ye.
FUBAR for Sure
Computer technicians are extraordinarily fond of acronyms – fonder, it that’s possible, than even the military. I’ve selected a few examples from recent headlines:
NVIDIA launches GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Cyberpunk 2077 Edition – a limited run GPU
BJP Tweets IMF’s April GDP Estimate Which Was Lowered In June
AMD Ryzen 9 5900H delivers +23% single-core performance gain over Ryzen 9 4900H on Geekbench while cocking a snook at the Intel Core i7-10700K
A new system designed by Rockstar devs could improve NPCs in GTA 6
ASUS Z490 Motherboards Tested With Intel Rocket Lake Desktop CPU, Lack PCIe Gen 4.0 Support on M.2 Slots
It is clear even to me that a lack of PCle Gen4.0 support is very likely fatal to M.2 Slots and will probably cock a snook at your ASUS every time.
Well, every profession has its jargon, a major function of which is to keep the riff-raff out. Ask your doctor about Abluminabliblamab. He’ll be glad to tell you it’s a zeezobactic inhibitor for people suffering from moderate to severe blastomyelitic poryphyry to improve your NPCs. Then he’ll go off to giggle in the supply closet.
The Great Leap Forward to 4,000 BC
“Simplifying” the grammar of English and blowing up its hard-won standardized orthography are probably not sufficient to render the language useless and its previous forms incomprehensible. “If a man does away with his traditional way of living and throws away his good customs,” said an African proverb, “he had better first make certain that he has something of value to replace them.”
Recognizing this, the Japanese contingent of the Furr’s conspirators introduced the emoji. In the words of Wired, emoji are “more like a primitive language. The tiny, emotive characters—from 😜 to 🎉 to 💩—represent the first language born of the digital world, designed to add emotional nuance to otherwise flat text.” In just over twenty years, the number of officially recognized emojis has grown to 3,521.
That Wired description is interesting. How is it that a “primitive” language “adds emotional nuance”? What makes a text “flat”? The fact that it is written only in English? Is English by definition without emotional nuance, or only so for people who can scarcely comprehend it? Let’s see. Here are a couple of flat (words only) texts, first as originally written, then given enhanced emotional nuance:
To be, or not to be: that is the question: / Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them?
2 🐝 or 🚫 2 🐝 that = ?
Whether = 👑+ in the 🧠 to 🤕
the slings + 🏹s of 😠ous $$$,
Or 2 take 🗡️🔫 💣 vs a 🌊 of 😟s
+ by ⚔️ing 🔚 them?
Of course, poetry may have been designed to supply its own emotional nuance. Maybe philosophical prose will provide a better test:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. . . .
🧑🤝🧑 📃these 🥠 = 💡,
that ♾️ 🚹 = ⚗️ed =,
that 🚹 = 💸 by their 🔱 w/🈯 🤳 ▶️s
This is the direction we’re headed. It will be hard to convince me that this language of crude imagery represents anything but a diminution of our ability to think or communicate clearly. “♾️ 🚹,” it could be argued, might represent “an infinity of pissoirs” as easily as it represents (in my translation) “all men.” “…these 🥠 = 💡” could, with some stretching, be taken to mean “these truths to be self-evident,” but it could just as well be translated “these fortune cookies are the same as incandescent bulbs,” which would be rather far from Jefferson’s intent.
The computer industry is dominated by people operating from the profit motive, and of course the advertising industry has never had an original impulse it wasn’t paid to have by one biz or another. People seeking to profit from selling back to other people what they have removed from their control clearly have no interest in maintaining, let alone increasing, those customers’ abilities to think or communicate clearly. They need idiots, not savants. How else are they going to get people to buy the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Cyberpunk 2077 Edition when they’ve been perfectly happy with the plain old 2076 Edition – in fact, have just barely learned to use it? No one in power has ever wished to be questioned or second-guessed, and those irritants will inevitably be reduced by reductions in literacy. In the case of government at all levels, such reductions will be advanced under the twin banners of Accountability and Transparency, two abstractions bracingly lacking in definable meaning.
Fortunately, advancing technology will soon make such antiquated concepts as “meaning” as irrelevant as the dodo or the typewriter, as Google headlines assure us:
Elon Musk’s Neuralink implanted a chip into a monkey’s brain and now he ‘can play video games using his mind’
Thought-detection: AI has infiltrated our last bastion of privacy
A wave of startups wants to make brain-computer interfaces accessible without needing surgery. Just strap on the device and think.
Startup wants to upload your brain to the cloud, but has to kill you to do it
Pass the baby owls, would you? 🙂
