IT'S ONLY WORDS

Dear Readers,
Yesterday, in the British Parliament during question time, Prime Minister Gordon 'Mr. Bean' Brown, who was giving an answer to a query by the opposition about the (what else?) state of the economic crisis, made a slight verbal blunder and said that his government had 'saved the world', when he meant to say that they had 'saved the economy'. Well, you would have thought he had just announced that he was Napoleon, or Batman's sister, the way the Conservative caucus exploded in a cacophony of hoots, hollers and farmyard noises in reaction to what was such a small slip of the tongue. (Anybody who still thinks British Politicians are all erudite and reserved should listen to some of the goings on at Westminster. If food was allowed in the chamber - one shudders...). The leader of the opposition, David Cameron, leapt on the flub, then spent the better part of a half hour lambasting the hapless PM for his gaffe while his backbenchers carried on like they had just found out they'd been granted free, unlimited drinking rights to every pub in England. Such an uproar over one little misplaced word.
I've been thinking a lot about words lately - more accurately, their modern usage - in a society where hand-sized computers allow us to do texting("OMG"), Twittering ("I'm twittering, what are U doing?") and make utterly pointless cell-phone calls ("I'm in the supermarket, where are you?") that seem to have monopolized the national conversation. It's nice, in a way, that we're all checking up on one another, but do we have anything much to say? Was the invention of all these giga-gadgets really necessary?
I find it quite ironic that in a modern world where we have the most incredible communication devices (Flash Gordon and Dick Tracy didn't know the half of it!) that compliment, confirm and cross-pollinate each other, the most popular use of all these melanges of microchips comes down to a few insipid words in a Twitter message or a 2-minute clip on You Tube. In a prophetic phrase, the late Marshall McLuhan (no, he's nothing to do with Lindsay LOhan) once famously remarked that 'the medium is the message'. Now, I gotta tell ya', I didn't know what the hell he was on about - until now. He was talking about TV a couple of generations ago, but he could have just as well been gassing on today about the IPhone or Blackberry ( if he wasn't...err.. dead). Words still deliver most of our messages,(often, a funny face or a middle finger will suffice) yet it seems as if fewer of them, over a shorter period of time, is just fine with most people these days, written or spoken - especially tailored for the new technology.
Ah, words. I think it was Adam who first lamented the death of the written word, and I guess every generation since has felt it's imminent demise as new inventions have pushed it farther out towards the margins. Yet it survives, albeit in much less challenging forms. Would James Joyce find a publisher today? (He just barely found one in 1922). He'd probably have to blog. How many times I have heard that the script of a play or a movie or a TV show is 'talky' (meaning 'wordy') and therefore uninteresting or unworthy. Take, for instance, the new movie based on the play Doubt, which was considered talky on the stage, but has apparently been 'rescued' by Hollywood - with the addition of some car chase scenes as the Nun played by Meryl Streep, in her Aston-Martin DB 5 hunts down the Priest, as played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, driving his Formula One Ferrari. Now that's dialogue relief. The ironic thing is that half the people in the movie theatre will be texting - i.e., using words (sort of) while viewing the action.
Maybe I'm too sensitive on the subject, since recently, I have become the 5 Billionth blogger in the blog-o-world. But I'm keenly aware that my ramblings must seem like La Recherche Du Temps Perdu compared with Twitter-ers and texters - and most bloggers, for that matter. But as new technology gives us less for more, old technology like the humble newspaper seems destined to join the Rosetta Stone as an object we can appreciate, but wouldn't have in the house. Newspapers have tried to save themselves by putting their content on the web, but reading a story or an article on some I-Thing just isn't the same. I mean, isn't a relief to have a dirty great huge, full-page underwear ad on the page opposite some horrific story you just read about a cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe? The same experience on a Blackberry? No can do.
Yet I'm content to let the universe unfold as it should. Thoughtful commentary and information is still widely available to those who seek it out and the current trend of reducing language to grunts and words-without-vowels will eventually lose it's cache. It's just that, as technology is making the world a lot less mysterious than it used to be, it seems to me that it's making it's inhabitants a lot less interesting.
Well, all I'm interested in at the moment is the kettle coming to a boil at last, because somewhere in this less-interesting world, it's 4 o'clock, and time for a cup of tea.