Uttered Nonsense


Have you ever thought about the words we use and why we use them or why those damned kids keep coming up with such annoying nonsense? What grammar nazi decided what perfectly constitutes the King's English? Who decided 'ain't' ain't kosher? Here's my best guess.

In the beginning every new word made by proto-humans could be considered the same as modern-day slang. They simply made it up as they went along, eventually weaving the more useful noises into an elegant vernacular brocade.

Thousand of years later we lost our verbal innocence when certain anal-retentives began assembling the first dictionaries. These resultant omnibi became the 'official' version of our language and everything else was just the other side of the ox-cart tracks. The bourgeoise was vocally cleaved from the proletariat and, thus, verbal racism was born. Slang became the grammatical terrorist.

Oh, sure, the occasional contrived word like 'minivan' or 'WMD' gets added to the official list every now and again but that's just a sop to the antediluvial tide of lingual innovation which washes over us daily. 'Groovy' can currently be found in your nearby Funk & Wagnall's but it gets used about as often as 'antediluvial' these days.

At some point, perhaps millions of years from now, every possible utterance that can emanate from a human will be cross-referenced, catalogued and given a particular definition. Maybe then, and only then, we'll shut up and start listening again.

=mike=