When We Stop Talking To Each Other, We All Lose.

Discourse is supposed to make us smarter, instead, the opposite is happening.

In his essay, Politics and the English language, George Orwell writes about the way that thoughts influence language and how language, in turn, influences thought:

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure,and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

The criticism is as valid today as it was 1946 when it was originally written, but today the problem isn’t just the imprecise and bloated language that Orwell points to, it’s the fact that conversations carried out in 280 character bursts in the online lingua franca of outrage, will inevitably skew towards point-scoring instead of nuanced discussion.

In fact, to expedite the ability to make points without the trouble of making them (as well as avoiding the Twitter character limit) an entire vernacular of conversation ending shorthand has appeared.

Having a disagreement with somebody older than you? An “OK Boomer” should be enough to…