Figure 1 – Summertime. (c) DE Wolf 2015
Well, it is June, and June is clearly part of summer. So we have arrived and “the living is easy.” Smug readers who live in America’s desert Southwest, in Arizona and Nevada, have stopped asking me how I can possibly stand living in Massachusetts. They have all retreated from the terrible and scorching heat into their homes in search of drinking water. In New England it is gentley warm and breezy, just perfect. We have successfully endured our one cruel season. It is time then to ponder weightier issues than the state of the weather – conundrums like the state of the language.
This past Sunday my wife and I went out for brunch – or as they say nowadays “we went brunching.” Is “brunch” a legitimate verb? I have opened up the Funk and Wagnall “Standard College Dictionary,” that my friend Shari Benson gave me for my 13th birthday. It has served me for a long while now, all through high school, college, and graduate school. There is no “brunching” in Funk and Wagnalls. It served me all the way through the nineties, when the tyranny of the word processor began. Microsoft Word says yes to “brunching.” I guess that it must be so.
Everyday when I blog or when I write papers at work I see Microsoft take incorrect stands on points of grammar. And eventually a general abhorrence of squiggly green or red underlining gives way to better sense and I accept Bill Gates’ spellings and grammar rules. It seems a bit sad, but I recently found myself surrendering to my greatest pet peeve the transformation of a verb into a noun and then into a totally different verb. Venus transits the Sun. It is a transition of, or really by, Venus. But Venus is not transitioning. It is still transiting – no matter what
You know I am going to leave this big gap here in appreciation of the fact that my computer took a unrequested ten minute break to shut down and update Windows. More cyber-tyranny and just the point that I am making!
anyone in Redmond, WA or Cupertino, CA, for that matter, thinks.
Still I capitulate! We have discussed these crossroads before. Digital vs. analog photography. Drones vs. mail-people. Transit vs. transition. Photography, communications, and language all evolve. Just as sexual reproduction functioned as an accelerator of biological evolution, the internet functions as an accelerator of language evolution. So right does not ultimately lie in a yellowing dictionary on my bookshelf, but rather somewhere in cyberspace which I visit now so much more often.
We are quick, too quick in fact, to make the transition. We plunge care-free and carelessly over the abyss forgetting the role that language plays in our shared identity. But in the end it is inevitable.