Thesaurus
Shakespeare would quite possibly be appalled at the degeneration of the language he so eloquently commanded those centuries ago. While scientific knowledge may have advanced at a logarithmic pace, the abundance of language aficionados has proceeded in an inverse fashion. While we make semantic prideful provisions for ourselves in self-deception, thinking that use of ‘Emojis’ is language evolving into a more efficient form of itself, the reality is that is decaying to the epoch of hieroglyphs in which imprecision, vagueness, ambiguity, and interpolations abound. There is a time and place for hieroglyphs…but that time and place is ancient Egyptian culture or on the Stele of Hammurabi – both of which are icons I can gladly be anti-iconoclastic about. Popular culture is not celebrating ancient culture with its idiomatic expressions that resonate with it, but rather being flummoxed by its limitations therein. Like the young toddler who has recently discovered he can walk quasi-autonomously and that one day he may even be a fighter jet pilot and really fly, but chooses rather to be reticent in the realm of crawling because this requires much less exertion and he can surely get where he needs to go by crawling – across the playroom floor, and who would ever think less of him for going there. Surely the crowd did not hiss at Caesar for giving his provisionary thumb signal during the gladiator games. They knew exactly what he meant. The difference is that Caesar, at least Julius, could also engage in discourse at the level of the “Gallic Wars” and did not use gesticulations as an adequate analogue for human language indefinitely. As the trend spirals downward, I hope Webster’s vision for intense and immense verbal communication that leads, not to pride, but to understanding can be a beacon among ships that are crashing in the night on the sands of yellow faces masquerading as verbal communication.
And now for a magic trick that is a shining example of such an effort…perhaps with a little sophistry as well!
