The Gift of Language

Over the weekend, I noticed and read several things that made me a little depressed both about my vocation and myself. It all stems from one thing: laziness. I am quick to see wrong actions and wrong beliefs in others, but also know they are in me or I would not be so quick to recognize them in others. The articles I looked over were about the fact that more and more schools are choosing to not teach the art of writing in cursive. It made me sad, but I personally only sign my name in cursive. So, not really helping the cause. What I noticed was that while driving a van full of Junior and Senior high school girls to Augusta and throughout the race, hotel stay, meals, and the eventual ride home. There seems to be a severe breakdown in language, both spoken and written. There are about, give or take, 250,000 words in the English language, but it seems we have settled for much, much less of a total. This breakdown of language can be seen in our writing, both on the student level and in our modern-day authors. Some of those said authors churn our 300-600 page books in mere months and some have even admitted to having ghost writers. It seems we have lost our imaginations and in giving that away to the many, cookie-cutter media outlets, we have also given away our memory of what it was like to read a story, or an essay that was thought about before it was written. We have become so lazy that we allow ourselves and those who write for us to follow patterns and insert new names into the same plots. We talk and write for utlitarian use only, but have lost even the true definition of that. We speak too much about things that do not need to spoken and leave unspoken all those things that need...must be spoken. We are lazy. We do not read as we should. We do not speak as we should. We do not write as we should. Which makes me no longer wonder why our leaders, teachers, preachers, ourselves, etc. cannot have a conversation or a dialogue about very important topics in very trying times, but this is not new. Humans have always been lazy with language. We have always tried to use two words to say one. We have seemingly wasted the gift of language. I wish I knew a remedy. I will end with a quote from Abigail Adams:

"We have too many high-sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them."