A Strange New Language?! Translators Wanted!

Memoirs of a Geezer!

Reflections and Observations -- A Bright Passage from the Fantasies of Youth 

to Illuminations of Advanced Maturity!

This Episode:    A Strange New Language?!  Translators Wanted!

"Dude...  Why you gotta bring your Xbox?"  As I entered my preferred coffee house recently, that's the first utterance that assaulted my ears.  (Is everyone named "Dude" today??!)  

"What the hell is an Xbox?" I asked, but not quite loud enough for the young questioner to hear.  I promised myself, however to "Giggle" the thing as soon as I was once again seated in front of my computer.  It's an iMac!  I'm a product of the 21st Century!  I mean, I wanna be hip; I'm a "now" kind of geezer.  (I mean, what if someone brings it up at book club?!)   

The Xbox statement spawned a deeply contemplative moment in my often porous brain, and like an obsessed salmon struggling up a roiling river cataract, the quest began.  I furrowed my brow and mused.  I think I even stroked my chin.  I began to think and wonder how the generations that preceded my own might have reacted to the newly fabricated words so common in today's "Techno-Age."

"Sancho, my Translator!!"  (I hope readers will forgive this paraphrased and possibly obtuse literary reference.)  I mean, let's begin, for example, with Giggle, I mean, Google, perhaps the world's most famous E-Commerce MegaSite.  Now, of course, the noun that has morphed into a verb.  My father would have pulled a quizzical face if I suggested he Google something.  Hell, I believe he would have tossed me out of the house.  Having been an intrepid and decorated FBI Agent, he was highly suspicious of almost everything new-fangled.  I recall he insisted the "Commies" had infiltrated CyberSpace as "dot-commies"!

And then there's "hashtag."  What a ridiculous word.  I asked a lucid 80-something-year-old man what he thought the word means.  "When I was a kid working the coal docks," he said, "Me and Mugwump used to grab lunch at Rosie Sluga's saloon and diner.  If we both ordered a bowl of Rosie's hash, she'd put a name tag on mine to tell it from Mugsy's."  

(I mean, what the hell's wrong with "number sign," or, better yet, because it has only one syllable, "Pound"!)

"Texting," "Sending a Text."  My mother would have said it meant mailing a book to an out-of-town relative.  "Blue Tooth."  Uncle George would have reacted in shock:  "See a dentist, quick!"  Then there's "iPod," "LOL," OMG," "IDK," "TBH," SIM Card," not to mention, "URL," Wi-Fi" and who knows how many other strange new and abbreviated words and phrases.  "Hey," remarks a good friend's 92-year-old father, "I've seen those letters floating in soup!"  

[ "You want a what?  A 'smartphone'?  Are you nuts?!  Telephones aren't smart or dumb...  They're emergency instruments!  When you get a job and your own place, go buy a telephone.  Until then, holler across the alley..."  (Excerpt from an imagined monologue, parent to child!) ]  

What would a past generation or two have made of bookface...  Or is it facebook?  Twitter?  Tweeting?  My foundry pals would have smacked me in the head if I suggested they "Tweet" their chums!  "How many MegaBytes you want?" would have sent many in our parents' and grandparents' generations running for the police.  Imagine trying to explain to our forebears and antecedents the new meanings of "cookies," "back button" and "surfing."  The brain spins freely in the cranium pondering the extraordinary changes in today's electronics-generated "tech-talk," the now frighteningly ordinary vocabulary of our modern age.  I can almost hear my long-dead grandfather:  "What the hell's E-mail?  A letter from Europe?"

So what do we do now, we geezers who love the English language and the elegantly refined speech patterns acquired in our own superbly educated youth?  Do we take up figurative arms in a quixotic (returning, for a moment, to the literary reference cited above!) gesture of defiance?  Ach!  Windmills!  It's of no use.  We must adapt or be wound up in a great web (not the World Wide one!) of anachronism.  Archaic relics, forgotten and ridiculed, an extinct species.  

As for me, I'm hiring a geeky 20-year-old kid with a few pimples on her (or his) chin.  A translator.  I'll do it!  I'll drag my tired brain into the Electronics Age.  I'll become a novelty, a geezer who knows how to sit for hours with friends and relatives, never once looking up, thumbs dashing over an illuminated keypad, OMG'ing and LOL'ing like a crazed "mute-babble" lunatic, inserting the word, "like" at every conceivable juncture! 

   Humbly Submitted, 05-21-14 -- Joel K.