By JOHN JEFFERSON SELVE
Aren’t you astonished by the proliferation of emoticons? At one time, emoticons served to mark a transition, nuance a statement, or add an “emotion” to a phrase. Now, smartphones are suggesting we use them to replace words themselves. They’re becoming a language.
Aren’t you surprised that even as we work our way toward artificial intelligence, we are diminishing our language, reducing its infinite richness — all to satisfy our ever-increasing appetite for the instantaneous? We go faster and faster to say less and less.
Aren’t you somewhat disconcerted when you go on YouTube to watch a cultural or political show from 10 years ago? It needn’t be very old for us to feel that it comes from a former world. People spoke a higher language, employed a richness of vocabulary we’ve now forgotten. As we watch, we feel these recent archives are drawn from a time…