In the present day, we see before us a seemingly idiotic and blasphemous dialect of English spoken among the general population. It is dictated with a degree of simplicity, brevity, but primarily stupidity that permeates through to our everyday life and interactions. There is nothing surreptitious about it, either. It’s a blatant, linguistic gesticulation of ignorance. Disguised as quick and concise, the manner in which we speak is breaking into a novel level of idiocracy. Accustomed to text-message bubbles and social media captions, we speak in such a brief sense that we now lack all substantial components of an advanced language. Adjectives are reduced to profanity, pronouns to blanket phrases and conjunctions to double and triple-letter conglomerations.

A titanic portion of time has passed since many of us have completely typed out the phrases, “I do not know,” “what about you?” or “on my way.” We are now left with tiny congregations of consonants; they can claim allegiance neither to abbreviations nor acronyms. An American youth will reiterate the phrase “like” a dozen times before ever uttering an adjective of remotely sufficient merit. Whenever an intelligent, unfamiliar or even slightly composite word is introduced within a social group, however, it inflates immensely. Much like a trend, it is used over and over by adolescents for hopes of sounding more intellectual, until it has lost all flavor, and its use then connotes abuse. We see now before us a linguistic catastrophe, perpetuated by our ever-growing “happy ignorance” as a vast and diverse population.

Dialect is a dynamic phenomenon. It alters itself based on time period, region, mood, creativity, party and various other factors. Someone in Alabama does not use the same verbiage as someone in Massachusetts. Likewise, one born in the year 1619 would not have used the same dialogue as a millennial. It is largely subjective; however, our vehicle of communication appears to be becoming subjectively less intelligent. Is our Earth losing intelligence? I do not believe that this is the case. In my opinion, intelligence follows, partially, a law parallel to the Law of Conservation of Mass. To explain my point: intelligence, if to adhere to a certain metric, may very well exist eternally, in a fixed amount. This meaning that it can never be created nor destroyed. So, if the amount of intelligence on Earth is static, where is the rest of it nowadays? I am convinced that a good portion of it is now harbored in technology. Frequently referred to as “Artificial Intelligence,” the technology that we utilize every day is evidently “smarter” than we (as can be seen as I type this piece and my computer is correcting every 11th word that I inscribe). Intelligence has not reduced itself … it has, instead, migrated elsewhere.

Is there a reason that we can’t talk anymore? Part of it has to do with our lack of smarts. But it also has to do with the fact that we’ve gotten so much lazier. Technology exists to make everything easier, and that’s exactly what it’s doing. Except it’s making everything dangerously easy. Our phones, our computers, our watches put everything at our fingertips. This quickness is something that we’ve become accustomed to. We, especially those of us in the West, expect everything to come and go quickly. Conveniently. And language gets caught in the mix. What’s better about “K coming” than “Okay. I am coming”? It’s faster. We humans have gotten all caught up in beating time, and now our brilliant language of commerce and global interaction is turning into a garbage can of slang and symbols. Language isn’t for interaction anymore; it’s for communication. No more getting to know each other. Only getting to know the details. Because we don’t care about each other. We only really care about the logistics.

On and on we hear how our phones and too much screen time is bad for us. But we don’t really know how bad. It makes us more brief and less sincere. A good example is thanking people. “Thank You” notes used to be a pretty big thing. Now, a real, “Thank you so much for everything you do!” is turned into “ty.” “Okay, I appreciate it,” is now “K.” That’s not good. It feels insincere, if it feels at all. Noticing that language has gone from such an emotional thing to more of a type of communication is kind of sad, but it’s true, and it goes to show the direction we’re headed in. Our decline is easily seen through how stupidly we speak to each other.

To be honest, I do it too. I talk short. It’s OK sometimes, but it’s still bad. Like i guess it’s bc of our surroundings and stuff. The world has gotten faster, more developed. What do we expect? Idk. It’s weird. Real weird. I wish English werelike it used to be. The connection between ppl was important, but we lost it, and that like really sucks. R we getting stupider? If so, what happens if we keep getting so stupid? Probably something real bad. Imagine if we, like, continue on this slope? I wonder what can happen from it? Scary thought. idk. I like used to think it was nbd, but now im kinda scared its gonna end up bad. I’m worried. I’m concerned. R u?