Poem: "When the Frame Comes Off"

[ysabetwordsmith]

This poem is spillover from the April 5, 2016 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from siliconshaman. It has been sponsored by lone_cat.


"When the Frame Comes Off"


Language is not a static picture
but a living, growing thing
always in motion.

Most of the time it circles
around the same center, but
sometimes it changes rapidly.

The internet is one of those things
that changes everything.

Language adapts to keep up
with the shifting culture
and technology.

When the frame comes off,
it can change very fast.

Adding vocabulary
is easy and common.

Changing grammar
happens less often.

It's the punctuation
that changes most rarely.

So when you see
the whole word order
shifting around, and
punctuation marks used
to create fresh compounds,

then you know that we're in
a period of high fast change.

This is the beginning of
new!English, as different
from what came before
as the shifts from Old
to Middle to Modern.


A hundred years from now,
it will be as hard for anyone
to understand what we wrote
as for us to read Chaucer
or even Beowulf.

It's exciting to watch the change
in the moment, as it happens, live,

linguistics with the frame taken off.

* * *

Notes:

Take a look at some of the inventions that changed everything.

Languages change in many ways, but they usually do so slowly, all the time. Occasionally you see a big fast jump such as the Great Vowel Shift.

Social media, the internet, and other modern aspects are changing the English language. One big impact comes from the rise of emoji, and while some people mock or ignore them, other folks find that these symbols greatly enhance their ability to communicate. All this is happening at high speed.

Comments

[thnidu]

One of my favorite filk songs is Cat Faber's Yogh and Ash and Thorn, which is in large part about the Great Vowel Shift.

(Or, as I sometimes abbreviate it in my notes,
ȝ æ þ.)

Wow!

[ysabetwordsmith]

That is an awesome song. <3

Re: Wow!

[thnidu]

Yeah, Cat's pretty awesome.

[callibr8]

Thought you might be interested to know, if you don't already, that the author of the Great Vowel Shift page which Ysabet links to -- is Cat's husband, who is a tenured professor of Medieval English at Carson Newman University in Jefferson City, TN.

Wow!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I did not know that. How awesome!

[thnidu]

She mentions him on the page I linked to, but I don't see any link to a page about it.

[mdlbear]

Another relevant song by Cat is Say Again, Tower.

[thnidu]

Yes indeed. Yogh and Ash and Thorn in our past, Say Again, Tower in our future. It keeps going on.

[sweet_sparrow]

<3

[thnidu]

❤ your icon every time I see it.

[sweet_sparrow]

<3 Thank you. I wish I could take credit for it, but that goes to timepunching. I like your default icon a lot too. It always brightens my day a little when I see it. ^_^

[thnidu]

(Loiosh flies over to your shoulder and nuzzles your ear.)

[sweet_sparrow]

Oh. Hello. *moves head a little to offer a slightly easier/longer seat* Nice to meet you.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

That top ten world-changing invention list is missing one. The aeroplane. What the car did for short to medium sized distances, the aeroplane did for long distances and crossing oceans. No more do you have to be completely cut off from your friends across the sea, or suffer the hazards and time lost of a shipboard passage... you just walk down the jetway, sit down, wait five, ten, fifteen hours - but no more - and walk back up the jetway and *magic* you're in an entirely different world. your money doesn't work, they don't speak your language, they drive on the wrong side of the road, and the eggs aren't in the refrigerator section where every red-blooded American knows they belong. Oh, and did I mention social medicine, where you can get seen to for free, foreign or domestic (though it might take a little while), or for thirty quid the chemist can see you right this second and patch you up good as new. And did I mention he all but *apologised* for having to charge me?

IT OPENS YOUR MIND, being able to do that. It's one thing to hear about it (and all the Fox-News-generated horror stories), it's another thing to go *live it* yourself for a week.... and only take a day to get home.

The warp drive - *when*, not if, it happens - will do the same thing for space travel as the aeroplane did for intercontinental travel. Walk on, sit down, blast off, *blip*, atmospheric re-entry, unbuckle, get up, and walk out onto *another world*... to be able to do that *and come back to Earth* and have it not be generations later is really gonna put some peoples' worldviews on their ear.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>> That top ten world-changing invention list is missing one. The aeroplane. What the car did for short to medium sized distances, the aeroplane did for long distances and crossing oceans. <<

True.

>> No more do you have to be completely cut off from your friends across the sea, or suffer the hazards and time lost of a shipboard passage... you just walk down the jetway, sit down, wait five, ten, fifteen hours - but no more - and walk back up the jetway and *magic* you're in an entirely different world. <<

I think this was more applicable a decade ago, before security theater turned airports into molestation gauntlets, and the extra time added has drastically reduced the efficiency and therefore appeal.

>> your money doesn't work, they don't speak your language, they drive on the wrong side of the road, and the eggs aren't in the refrigerator section where every red-blooded American knows they belong. <<

Visiting other countries is fun.

>> Oh, and did I mention social medicine, where you can get seen to for free, foreign or domestic (though it might take a little while), or for thirty quid the chemist can see you right this second and patch you up good as new. And did I mention he all but *apologised* for having to charge me? <<

Wait times vary, and that's a feature of socialized medicine and capitalist medicine. In any system, however, health care that is not promptly available when people need it is useless at best, worse than useless sometimes. So if your system isn't efficient, it is not good. There are better ways.

It's something I noticed in Terramagne, but it took a while, because the characters don't notice a lot of the really cool stuff there. Like how it's rare for anyone to walk more than a block or few to a bus station, or wait more than 5-10 minutes for a bus; and that bus is on time. Or how someone can walk into a community center or community clinic and usually get to see a community counselor right then, or in a few minutes if currently busy. There's a mix of free and paid care, but the free options take care of most basic to moderate needs, so less gets bad enough to require lengthy expert attention.

>> IT OPENS YOUR MIND, being able to do that. It's one thing to hear about it (and all the Fox-News-generated horror stories), it's another thing to go *live it* yourself for a week.... and only take a day to get home<<

Yeah.

>> The warp drive - *when*, not if, it happens - will do the same thing for space travel as the aeroplane did for intercontinental travel. Walk on, sit down, blast off, *blip*, atmospheric re-entry, unbuckle, get up, and walk out onto *another world*... to be able to do that *and come back to Earth* and have it not be generations later is really gonna put some peoples' worldviews on their ear.<<

*wist* I have admit the jumpgates are tempting, in the Blueshift Troupers.