I am participating in 31 Days of Five Minute Free Writes 2019 (all of my submissions can be found here).
Today’s prompt is: SAME
I know this sounds ticky, but … where have all the words gone?
I have gotten into this habit, so I am pointing the finger at myself as much as anyone else, but we are definitely embracing word shortcuts more than ever.
Maybe it’s social media; maybe we’re just all busy. Maybe I should practice what I preach and remind myself that “language evolves.”
When I agree with someone else, whether it is in writing a response on Facebook or chatting in person, I am just as likely to say “SAME” as I am to say, “I agree with you” or “I feel the same way.”
Hashtags strike me this way also. I know we only have a limited amount of characters to play with on Twitter (it used to be 140 in the old days; now it’s 280). We may tweet, “I ran 4 miles today. #Exhausted” when we mean, “I ran 4 miles today. I am exhausted now and plan to eat pancakes.”
Hashtags do away with all kinds of parts of speech. Goodbye subject, verb, conjunctions and more. #Exhausted.
Everyone gets the point (usually), and time is saved along with keystrokes.
But the use of hashtags and the omission of everything but the most sparse expressions leave me yearning for a sentence diagram or two.
Wife of one, Mom of two, Friend of many. My pronouns are she/her/hers.
I do like hashtags! But I also miss full sentences.
(I started to reply “same”!). I agree. I know language evolves and I understand why we have all (many of us at least) started defaulting to shortcuts, but sometimes it’s worth the air and keystrokes to say things the long way.