B E B E R E

Outmoded in her early 30s

Richard Lawrence Cohen's post on linguistic senescence had me grinning and nodding in agreement. I'm neither a writer nor interested in eavesdropping, so I tend to not pay such close attention to the nuances of conversations around me. Still, I've found that over the past maybe 3-4 years, a lot of new jargon/slang/whatever you want to call it has cropped up. Since I don't watch television, I'm missing a lot of cues there even if they are from "stale" sources. In the blog world I have some grasp of the more bandied-about terms like "fisking" (something a professor of mine used to warn against getting too much into way back when) and "instalanche" (something that can be more trouble than it's worth in some cases). Reading newspapers and most anglophone fiction after perhaps WWII just isn't worth my time or effort anymore, so I don't. Perhaps this is cutting me off from the culture in general, but I guess I have other priorities. It wouldn't surprise me to one day end up like the old man in this cautionary tale.