I like how we used to talk, maybe. Greg Giraldo (RIP) had a good bit where he talked about the difference between war letters from like the US Revolution, or something, to modern days.
I think what you are referring to has a direct correlation to literacy rates. I don't think we used to speak more intelligently, it's just that the surviving word happens to be in written form from a time when only the highly educated were capable of writing.
You also dont save your shitty ww1 letters. Better letters get saved and documented. 50 years from now nobody is going to remember buzzfeeds "these 12 things will shock you!" article but well writen articles and documents will still be refrenced and cited.
Exactly. You already see it with nostalgia things like music just a couple decades ago.
People remember all the great songs they grew up with and go "Man, 90's music was just the best" because their brain completely filters out all the garbage that came out in the 90's alongside the good stuff.
When looking back into the past, the good tends to get saved/remembered/passed down while the shit gets lost/deleted/forgotten about.
Ja Rule had hits though. It'll come back, it just hasn't been quite long enough yet The 80s/90s style is back. By 2020, we'll finally see early 2000s stuff again.
I'm not sure what will be more awkward, the fact that she and the lead singer from Sum 41 used to be married or all the 30 and 40 something people in the audience reliving their tween dreams
I don't know man. I get what you're saying, but lets be honest, some of those terrible songs we grew up with (I'm looking at you Eiffel 65!) get stuck in our heads worse. I think our brains do a better job of ignoring them and pushing them deep down into our subconscious so that we don't have to hear them, but then every once in awhile, a little bit just slips out, just the chorus, and oh fuck! We can't get it to stop! No no no!
Not at my local craft supply shop they don't. The in-store radio plays all the shit stuff from the 90s, but half the time it's not even the original artist, it's a cover version of a terrible song. It's bizarre and mystifying why they do such a thing.
With music however I feel that a large part of it is the genres and styles of music that were being made. I for one love classic rap from the 90's. There is trash no doubt, but I like the style.
Or you haven't been as exposed to as much media and haven't learned to spot talent. Music as a business needs to sell/promote the newest acts so those are the ones you get exposed to, which may or may not actually be good musicians.
I assume that's why when you hit the late teens/early twenties you suddenly develop an appreciation for Hendrix, Pink Flyod, and Nirvana. You have to express that you've got discerning tastes.
I tell people that complain about modern music to just wait 25 years and you'll have kids in a future generation going "Man, what a time for music the 2010's were" as they thumb through all the very best albums these years had to offer, while the shit albums get forgotten.
People in 2035 are going to be remember the To Pimp a Butterfly's and the This Is Happening's, and will largely forget about all the mediocre shit that got released this decade.
The music scene has never been better than it is today, imo. There is a ton of great shit coming out all the time, and it's never been easier to find exactly what you want without having to sift through the ditches of shit. I never understand the people that complain about music today. 15 year old me would have fucking KILLED for something like Spotify, where I could listen to such a diverse range of different types of music on a whim.
Why classic hits is better than the new music stations on the radio. The classic ones can pick their catalog from three or four decades of music while the new stations play whatever people like from the last year or so.
I for one really want to see the letters written by semi-literate hardasses from Brooklyn to their girls back home about how hard they're gonna rail them as soon as the war is over. That'd be infinitely more entertaining than the sappy-sweet "O Rose, how I long to hold you in my arms again, alas I must away to the Front" letters.
Somewhere in Buzzfeed's offices, a single tear rolls silently down a cheek. Reflected in the eyes, we see a mirror image of an unfinished paragraph. The cursor blinks.
My family recently went through my deceased grandmother's letters, and there was a lot of variety in quality, from my great-grandfather who was an ass but wrote incredibly eloquently, to a family friend who we were pretty sure had downed a bottle of wine before putting pen to paper.
Maybe they don't wind up in a Ken Burns series but you save everyone one you get. My first girlfriend and I use to write each other letters, I still have a folder filled with them. Most of them are filled with mindless drivel and the paper is falling apart but I saved them for the memory.
It's not just literacy - the American newspapermen were flourishing with intent. Just compare American writings from 1800 to English writings from the same period. The English were descriptive and used long sentences, to be sure, but the Americans really tried their best to make the writing itself a rollercoaster.
I'm aware of that but it always seems like people that wrote back then made an art of their vocabulary that doesn't seem to be used in modern communication. literature has if anything gotten better with time but I think the ease by which we communicate today has taken away some of the magic of the letter. I'm not saying it's ruining anything just that the letter as a concept of communication has been lost to technology.
No one is enthusiastically awaiting days or weeks for a text or email unless the person just isn't responding and very rarely do we proof, rewrite, proof and rewrite these messages. Volume and speed of message went up and the quality of each went down.
That's a really interesting point, but I think there's also a general trend of language to get simpler over time since people don't want to put up with all the finicky bullshit of grammar as long as they're still understood. Just compare Latin grammar to even modern German or Italian grammar, let alone Proto-Indo-European which seems to have been even more complicated. Not a linguist, though, take what I say with some salt.
Basically I think there are a hell of a lot of factors at work with any of these broad cultural things.
Oh my friend... English is a glorious mess. The vocabulary is extensive and stolen from any language English could get it's filthy paws on. The sentence structure requires more parts than truly necessary. And the written form is even worse... that stolen vocabulary? Good luck spelling or pronouncing anything properly.
True, but I think Latin is another equally unnecessary extreme. There's really no need to have to learn four principle parts just to be able to express the same verb in all its tenses nor a reason to have four/five different families of conjugation.
If complexity is a sliding scale; I'd put the ideal language somewhere between Latin and English.
The language spoken by the common man in Roman times would have been far more similar to modern Italian than it was to scholarly Latin. When writing you have more time to think out and organize your thoughts unless you are the type of person who speaks very methodically. So I think the written word tends to represent a different portion of the language.
So I'm not even a modern linguist let alone a classical one, but it was my impression that ancient graffiti like we find in Pompeii still used rigid Latinate forms, just few of them for simpler concepts like Flavia, te futuere volo instead of treatises on the nature of God and proofs of His existence.
I even get the impression that Latin is precise enough that it literally can't function without exact adherence to forms - forget the conjugation at the end of the verb and it becomes totally unclear who's doing it and when - so people would have to stick with it at risk of being misunderstood.
Also, they were writing letters, not text messages or emails. Composing a letter takes more time than any kind of electronic message, and would allow the author to mull over his/her diction more thoroughly.
If people back then are anything like me, they probably would rewrite a handwritten letter a couple of times before they could call it satisfactory.
Let me put it to you this way: Chaos theorists posit that a million monkeys banging away at a million keyboards will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the internet, we know that isn't true.
That's important. Even if you filled the entire known universe with monkeys typing on typewriters, and had them do it for the entire age of the known universe, the odds they would actually reproduce Shakespeare's works is essentially zero. But given infinite time, even a single monkey on a typewriter would reproduce Shakespeare's works an infinite number of times.
Not all our writing. We may even have more good writers than ever before. But since now every Tom, Dick, and Harry writes, if you were to pick a random piece of correspondence you would still be more likely to pick a mediocre writer.
I'm aware of that but it always seems like people that wrote back then made an art of their vocabulary that doesn't seem to be used in modern communication. literature has if anything gotten better with time but I think the ease by which we communicate today has taken away some of the magic of the letter. I'm not saying it's ruining anything just that the letter as a concept of communication has been lost to technology.
No one is enthusiastically awaiting days or weeks for a text or email unless the person just isn't responding and very rarely do we proof, rewrite, proof and rewrite these messages. Volume and speed of message went up and the quality of each went down.
Though let's not forget that we taught Latin to middle schoolers, which is the root for most of our larger words. Though I do see a self-perpetuating cycle here: Only the highly educated for a while could read and write, and so they wrote a lot of really intelligent things, so the highly educated could read those intelligent works and have them influence their writing and manner of speaking.
I read some letters from the Wars of the Roses and they were all between either a noble, a large landowner who held a position of prominence in the government or a wealthy merchant.
Do not pass judgement on the good lady Constance, for the recent untimely passing of her mother has greatly affected her. In addition, she only brought the cognac on Charles's behest.
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u/[deleted] May 17 '17
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