I had an odd “conversation” with Granddaughter Number One last night. I put “conversation” in inverted commas because it was a conversation via Messenger. My daughter, Granddaughter Number One, Granddaughter Number Two and I communicate regularly, sometimes daily, via a group chat. Sometimes there’s a bit too much information about the daily routine, complaints about this and that, the frustrations of the workplace, photos of various pets and so on but it serves to keep us all in contact, which is useful in this modern age of anxiety and stress. For example, Granddaughter Number Two, at university in York, went to a concert in Leeds the other night and kept us updated on her movements - “I’m at the railway station”, “I’m on the train”, “I’m home safely”.
Back when I was a university student, I just had to be sure to write home once a week to reassure the parents that I was still alive and well and thus prevent anyone from leaping on a train to come and visit and make sure I was fine. We had no telephone at home in those days. Later, when my parents had a telephone, whenever we visited I had to phone as soon as we arrived home to let them know we were home safely. Otherwise my mother imagined us mangled in a car pile-up on the M62!
Anyway, I had an odd conversation with Granddaughter Number One. It’s that time of year when people start asking for suggestions for Christmas presents for various members of the family. In this case it was “What shall I get for Grandad?” Definite.y NOT SOCKS was my first response. I made some suggestions and, knowing that she is almost constantly short of money and that Grandson Number One is currently feeling very well off, suggested that maybe she could go shares on a present with him, as he has been asking the same question.
So the next message from Granddaughter Number One was, “I text him but he never reads text messages.” My next suggestion was that she should phone her brother. “Nobody,” she told me, “phones anyone any more these days”. Well, I do and told her so. Her sister, 21 year-old Granddaughter Number Two, joined in with, “I phone people!” A sort of, “see, it’s not just the old folk!’
But I fear it may be true that, just as people don’t write letters, masses of people don’t make actual phone calls as frequently as they used to. There are, of course, exceptions, such as those people who have long, rambling conversations on their mobiles on the bus, often revealing things about heir health, their work situation, their troubled love life for all the other passengers to share with them. It’s as if being surrounded by strangers gives a feeling of being in a sort of confidential bubble where you can say whatever you like.
By the way, when Granddaughter Number One sent me the message ‘ I text him’, this raised another bugbear of mine: the past tense of the verb ‘to text’ should surely be ‘texted’ but more and more frequently I hear “I text’, as if it were ‘texed’ past tense of the verb ‘to tex’. Mini-rant over! It’s one of the odd ways that modern technology has influenced the way we use language. This article about the “word of the year”, tells us that the invention of the telephone is often credited with the usage of “hello and “hi”. And words and expressions that we think of as thoroughly modern, such as “brain-rot”, the article reveals to have been around for far longer than we might think. American writer Henry David Thoreau apparently wrote way back in 1845: “While England endeavors to cure the potato‑rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
I recently wrote about fewer children reading for pleasure, another change in modern society that might be attributed in part to modern technology such as mobile phones and tablets and computer games. Here’s a link to an article on this subject by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett. She describes herself as being “ part of the microgeneration that made it to college age without much engagement with social media, only to live through a major transition from the printed word to the digital that has shaped humanity in untold ways” and believes that people of her age “are still digesting what it means to have bridged these two eras as young people.”
I can sympathise with her generation’s feelings of confusion. After all, many of my generation grew up, or at least spent our primary school years, without television and without a telephone in the home.
I could go on about other changes in the world and in lifestyle but maybe that will be for another day.
Here’s a link to an article about a “good news” event, a “shock of hope” as French President Macron described the reopening of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Some damaged buildings do get restored.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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