So the point is that language does not seem to me to have been a guaranteed development - it seems more like the invention of a madman, much like a fireaxe (for who else would dream of attacking fire with an axe?) - and this, combined with the diversity language has taken on, piques my interest and also my hunger for a delicious block of cheddar, which is not called "the thinking cheese" for nothing.
Actually, I guess I could have ended that sentence two words earlier and made it a lot more accurate.
Anyway, the upshot of all that stuff is that I'm interested in language. This is why I halfway deplore the devolution into gibberish that the Internet and text messaging via cellphone seem to be causing in the language, but it is worth commenting that a major factor in my stance towards that is because it is easy and fun to rant about it. Of course, language tends to change over time despite such influences, not because of them - it exhibits an extremely apparent evolutionary course (though, I hasten to add for purposes of my own defense, evolution in a non-teleologic sense, which is not a connection many people seem to automatically make when hearing the word "evolution"; they assume it is evolution in the sense of bettering rather than changing). There is a reason unrelated to the squid people that we have hundreds or thousands of distinct languages on Earth today, after all.
This is evident today mostly in the emergence of dialects. I notice, for example, that my mode of diction is markedly different from that of most of the people I work with, many of whom come from very different backgrounds, and in some cases, it would seem, planets, from my own. Words such as "dawg" or "whucho" emerge, sometimes having very different meanings from the words or phrases they resemble.
It makes me think that if I were to be dropped (rather unexpectedly, I would assume) one hundred years in the future, I would have an exceedingly difficult time figuring out what the people around me were saying, even if they were speaking this future equivalent of English. No doubt they would talk about playing "gawlf" and employ noises like "izzle" and not know how to use the subjunctive tense, though that last point isn't so much futuristic as a trait of the typical modern English-speaker. Literacy would be a thing of the past. Punctuation and capitalization would be crimes (CAPITAL crimes). Ralph Nader would still be running for President, because he is clearly some sort of love- and solar-powered eco-robot. The actual Presidency, of course, would be held by squid people. The national slogan would be "whucho gawlf handicap, dawg?"
Yeah, that's pretty much all I've got for now.
