Practical Tips for Peaceful Living - Vol VI (Oct 17 thru Jan 18)

The Guardians of Language …
(10/19/2017)
Oh, how I adore the intricacies & bemusements of language (especially the
delightful absurdities & brilliant abundances of my own); how I do truly love the foreplay
& the interplay and the play-by-play of words -- the way in which we humans can
string together an otherwise garbled mass of sounds -- guttural moans & subtle
screeches & staccato syllables -- to somehow convey our thoughts or our desires or
our fears or our hopes to another ... How utterly amazing this capability is to me, and
what a great gift we have been given therein! And yet in this day and age of texting
& tweeting -- in these times of distance & diminishment where our “intimacy”
consists primarily of gazing often somberly into the smallest of video screens, I have
found myself mourning the loss of language.
Though by my own account no wordsmith by any means, I find myself
deploring the wayward direction our species is headed -- especially regarding the
ways we now “communicate” with one another. And whereto, I often wonder?
Towards a most perilous cliff where, once plummeted over, we will solely speak to
one another with silent clicks on a keyboard? -- or where eye-contact becomes a jailable
offense? -- or where actually speaking to one another is considered a sign of
insanity? Such thoughts do not plague me often, and yet tax me on occasion they do
still ... And then along comes someone like
Stephen Fry -- a devout & veritable “Guardian of
the Language”; so much so that merely listening to
him becomes an act of reverence -- a glorious
renewal in my faith that the Beauty that is the
English language indeed will never fully die.
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