The Pun Also Rises(as seen in the North Adams Transcript)
"The Importance Of Communication"The time between Thanksgiving and ChristmaChanuKwanzakah is a time to remember friends and family. And more specifically, it's a time to remember that it's been roughly a year since we've written to those friends and family, and in a few weeks, we might be hoping for some presents from those friends and family. This makes it the ideal time for writing them a letter to remind them how much they love you. A common technique is to end the letter with a two word imperative, demanding that they bestow affection upon you. In the old days, before electricity was invented, people communicated by repeatedly dragging small tubes of ink or graphite over sheets of parchment, to leave markings. Nowadays, nobody does this anymore except for your parents. The rest of the world communicates by use of the computer, an ingenious device that takes all the labor and inefficient personal writing out of the personal letter. Most people now write one Christmas letter on the computer, print it out, and just change the name on top for each person they send it to. It may not be long before this impersonal writing method even affects us, here in INSERT TOWN HERE. If you have children, they probably don't have time to slave all day over a printer and seal an envelope, so they'll just email their holiday greetings. (Even if your children are only 2 months old, they not only know how to use email, but probably already have a profile on MySpace.) This saves lots of time for everyone involved by replacing the lengthy Christmas letter with "Mery Xmas LOLOL <3". There are some people, mostly book-reading types, who feel that this represents a breakdown in communication. They'd argue that computers may help us send things faster, but we email with less and less to say. That instant messages and online chatting are quite literally tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. That someone might write an entire column about Thanksgiving but somehow fail to send it correctly and not realize it until a week later, thus not getting it in to INSERT PAPER HERE before it becomes completely irrelevant. Well, you shouldn't trust those book-reading types. What would they know about communication anyway? They spend their free time reading books to relax, which is almost as bad as the people who write books. Writing has nothing to do with communication, as proved by the fact that I do lots and lots of writing but my family always tells me I'm terrible at keeping up communication. But I have no communication to keep up; it's not as if I took courses in it at school. And I don't even trust the people who did. Ask someone who majored in communications what that really means, and they can't communicate it to you. No, communication isn't about reading and writing, or a fancy degree. Communication is just about getting your ideas across to other people. So while literate people might frown on an Internet chat language, it's just the parlance of our times. If ideas can be shared using abbreviations, who is to say it's any less valid than proper English? Would Neil Armstrong have been any less impressive if he had text messaged "1 smal step 4 man, big leap 4 mankind, ROTFL!!!"? Would Shakespeare be less classic if he had written "2B or not? y/n???" If we can make ourselves understood, that is what matters most. My father always said that communication is paramount. Or possibly MGM. Either way, I never really understood what he meant. ___________________________________ All work on this page is copyright Seth Brown. If you are sharing it, please give attribution. If you want to reprint it, please contact me first. |