@popping wrote:
Hip young people shorten "coRONAvirus" as RONA.
Hip young people - along with people who pretend to be hip and/or young when they're not - have all sorts of slang and expressions. Change is cool and interesting, even when things don't mean what they used to mean, even though "un-hip" and "old" people have been complaining about such changes since ancient times.
But the sad state of "ineloquency" (what I call "linguistic ignorance/illiteracy") has become quite awful in recent decades. It's quite the opposite of "linguistic evolution" - it's devolving back into half-unintelligible primitive noise. People aren't "hip" in my mind just because they parrot the popular memes, they're "hip" when they're able to articulate their thoughts and intents in ways which make their meanings clearly understood. Everyone be gangsta in a society of thoughtless babbling idiots, I honestly can't decide if it's tragic or if it's comic.
And so much worse for those parrots who struggle with their first language. You can't easily think about or conceive thoughts and ideas when you have no vocabulary for them. You can't easily imagine alternate perspectives when you have no words to help immerse yourself into them. I can't wait for the coming decades, when the worst of today's half-deaf half-mute half-dumb half-illiterate young ones become the adults, lol.
I remember a time when it was "normal" for most people to speak several languages at home. When we were forced to learn languages. When we wanted to communicate with other people without depending on mangled translations from Google/Siri/Alexa/etc.
