The long break
in blog posts has been on account of what you could probably call direct
marketing for my blog, although the truth is always more frivolous than my
well-crafted lies.
During this
period, I’ve taken quite a fancy to a number of things. I’m suddenly
very fond of the subjunctive. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve found grammar
so cool and moody. The subjunctive is insanely classy. The need to be judicious
with its use is what makes that sweet spot – the maximum possible amount of
class without being pedantic – even more unattainable and thereby even more
awesome.
The sudden spike
in socialising has also caused me to do a lot of thinking about language. I
wondered how spelling errors like ‘pwned’ and meaningless abbreviations like ‘sup’
were assimilated in the language with such alacrity but nobody ever thought of designing
some useful linguistic improvements. English sure could use them. We desperately
need a gender neutral pronoun. ‘He’ is sexist, ‘she’ is feminist, ‘they’ is
grammatically incongruent and ‘one’ is begins to sound comical after a point.
It makes third person writing very challenging, which is probably why so many writers
prefer the less accurate, more aggressive second person for everything other
than fiction. Uniformity in spelling and pronunciation on both sides of the Atlantic
would also be welcome. ‘Indian English’ incorporates elements of both, so I’ve
spent half my life thinking ‘color’ looks incomplete and the other half
wondering why ‘colour’ seems like a longer word than it should be. Phonetic
spellings could eradicate spelling bees and accents on the alphabets could make
English seem a lot artier than it is. If it were a computer language, we’d be
cursing Microsoft (and it’s always Microsoft’s fault) and wailing for debugging
at this point.
I have also realised that I no longer use the word 'random' as liberally as I used to. Economics has impressed the difficulty of achieving randomness. It's not something you can do randomly.
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