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My dearest Cory:
It is indeed a great pleasure to see you resurrected here (not that I thought you were dead, but your previous home disappeared into the ether). I am shocked, however, that you have failed to chastise a previous querrant for their use of the word "kewl". Surely this is a prime example of the degeneration of our beautiful language that will undoubtedly lead to the destruction of civilization as we know it. While your keen sense of tact and kindness to others may lead you to overlook such things and actually answer people's questions, you do have standards to uphold. Are people using such words in an attempt to appear "with it"?.
On a related note, I must register my disapproval of the use of emoticons in electronic communication. If we need little pictures of happy faces to get our point across, why bother with words at all? Why not just grunt? Again, one senses a population so barely literate that they cannot be sure of the meanings of the words they are using, and must supplement them with little pictures. Or maybe they too are merely trying to look "kewl".
Sandy O.
Dear Sandy:
Cory is grateful to you for teaching him the word “querrant”. It is deliciously apt since, he discovers, it is used in Ouija and Tarot, activities that are as far removed from reality as is Ask Cory.
Western “civilization as we know it” peaked in 1790, died in 1969 or so and has been rotting from within since. The cause of death was not misspelled words, but unrestrained greed and corporatism. We are now in the interval between death and falling over. The counsellors, fluffers, advisers, soothsayers and accountants who attend this column are united in suggesting to Cory, for his own health, that he be entertained by the various manifestations of post-mortem decadence and refrain from trying to resuscitate a corpse. Therefore he stares bemusedly at his screen when emoticons and words such as “kewl” pixelate upon it.
Cory begs you not to torture yourself with high expectations; rotting systems cannot produce good results. There remain, for our delectation, lovely things from the past and a few people who have developed their own social principles despite an absence of modeling.
Although the internet enables us to appear as “with it”, young, alternatively gendered, well-hung, and so on, intelligence and literacy cannot be faked; nor, for that matter, can coolness. A sage resident of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, of whom Cory is very fond, has remarked that internet relationships "can be over in a keystroke”. While such slicing cruelty cannot be condoned, it does point up the option we have to terminate the inanity that clogs our bandwidths (with a kind, grateful explanatory note, of course).
A further word on emoticons. Here are two sentences from the wonderful 1948 book A Voice Through a Cloud, by Denton Welch:
“Looking at the sides of the windows, I saw that some of the beautiful little brass handles on the shutters were broken or missing. I was given a vague uneasy feeling of universal damage and loss.”
That, dear readers, is an emotion explored. Compare that passage with what is conveyed by an emoticon, and you yourself should have a vague uneasy feeling of universal damage and loss.
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