Toronto

Digital Eskimos

The Cold Isolation Of Modern Language

Eskimo tribes had a thousand different words for snow, modern culture has one. The way people talked a couple hundred years ago is full of words that are now extinct, synonyms and nuances that have slowly disappeared, like a paint palette being reduced in spectrum from the rainbow to only primary colors. Like saber-tooth fangs in a museum, we marvel at the onomatopoeia and conjuring power of dictionary words such as the verb kench* (rhymes with quench), a Middle English word that means to laugh loudly. There were once hundreds of magnificent verbs and adjectives such as this roaming the earth, each magnificent in their own domain. The perfect word has a way of satisfying the previously unlabeled void it fills.

So why don’t we have as many words today? It’s not an idiocracy, people aren’t any different now than they were five hundred years ago, we just have fewer words and less opportunity to use them. This gradual narrowing of human expression has side effects. Think of the care and personal attention, the range of topics and feelings covered in a letter, especially when people had no alternative means of communication. The restriction of avenues of expression has a way of sharpening what remains. Now think of the most memorable SMS you’ve ever received. Any texts I can think of are noteworthy only as bookmarks for events that have their own significance. Even at its most eloquent, 160 characters is a very narrow frame in which to display a thought. How many people write a great haiku? The less you have to work with, the more mastery required with which to make something meaningful. It’s not that one form of communication or the other is better, it’s that it’s too easy to get one’s fill of companionship at the surface level, missing out of the depths human bonding is capable of reaching. Pushing away the chef’s delicacies because you ate two hamburgers in the car.

Sometimes the most meaningful thoughts take days or months to answer, your subconscious grinding away like a ten year old laptop lazily pushing a progress bar. There are 99999 seconds remaining in your transfer. How helpful. When you finally finish pondering, those are the thoughts that steer the course of your life. The deliberate decisions that shape who you are. It’s easy to ignore their insistence, pushing down the nagging uneasiness without ever recognizing it for what it is. Everyone decides what to do with their life, even if the choice is nothing more than unconsciously selecting indecision. Overlooking the significance of your life’s course is easier than ever with properly descriptive words dying off and digital thought coming in ever more truncated bursts. The ones and zeros are getting through with perfect clarity, but that analog range in the middle, the space between the raw data, that’s what we’re starting to ignore, and it’s what makes life worth living. I hope the Eskimos have a word for that, because I sure don’t.