We have reversed the once inexorable advance from primitive scribblings to precise written communication, and are descending into an inarticulate pit. You doubt me? Fools!

Around fifty-thousand years ago, the Australian Aborigines (Yeah, yeah, yeah, native peoples. Actually, not native: they arrived from Africa by way of Asia.) carved petroglyphic images onto rocks for purposes which we do not know. However, we do know that they expected somebody to look at them and get some message or other.

Around twenty-thousand years ago, the Frenchmen (excuse moi, Frenchpeople) inhabiting Lascaux took time off from their culinary pursuit of frogs and snails to paint pictures of horses (their other favorite food) on the walls of the caves in which they resided. By this mechanism, they hoped to increase their hunting success, either by propitiating the gods of really disgusting foods, or by attracting particularly vain nags who wished to gaze upon their likenesses. Notice that the French did not express their desires in written words, such as “Here, horsey, horsey, horsey!”

About five thousand years ago, the inhabitants of the Middle East and Southeast Asia made the great leap into symbolic writing. In another thousand years, the writing evolved into an alphabet. While the Egyptians were at first thought to have missed  the boat because their writing consisted of strings of pretty pictures, it turned out that the pictures were actually phonemes, just like letters of the alphabet.

So we were off and running, and soon followed Euripides (also known as “Ifixadese”), Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson (no, not the sex toy guy – the dictionary guy), and other literary lights.

All for nought!

The first source of our destruction and descent back into orthographic barbarism? Ubiquitous electronic buttons!

Think about elevators! Little triangles pointing toward each other where the rational person would just stamp the word “Close” on the damn button. How about video players? Little vertical lines instead of “Pause.” A little red dot instead of “Record.” Of course this is all the result of our ceding technological manufacturing to the Japanese in the 1980’s. Given their command of the English language at that point as evidenced by the instruction manuals they prepared (e.g. “putting the lovely wire into the holy place, you see many hours.”) maybe  it was all for the best.

The second source? The texting capability of the smartphone!!

Spelling counts, dammit! “U” is not “you.” “r” is not “are,” “rotflol” is not “rolling on the floor laughing out loud.” “fos” is not “****”.  As the next generation of larvae grow to loathsome maturity, they are doing so with no knowledge of the role of the silent “p” in “pneumonia,” the silent “k” in “knife.” They are not learning the virtues of patience, taking the time to lovingly inscribe a missive that would gladden the heart of the most pedantic maiden lady English teacher. They have lost the ability to pen a winsome poem which says tenderly “Hey , baby, let’s jump in the sack.”

The anemic concatenations of letters laughingly called “text” are nothing of the sort. They are a puerile parade of acronyms better suited to the mad ravings of government bureaucrats. [N.B. the latest Federal education guidelines mandate the replacement of some seventy percent of the high school reading list with government memoranda. Out with “Hamlet.” In with “The Environmental Impact of Peeing on the Lawn.”]

lol. The Feds are fos. Gdby.