You Should Talk!!

 The other day, while exchanging texts with my emoji-prone sister, I began thinking about the roots, development, and deterioration of human communication. Hey, I’m retired and have way-too-much time on my hands.

It must have started with a cave couple gathered around the campfire, waiting for that triceratops haunch spinning on a spit to reach exactly the right degree of dripping, bloody perfection.

She, gesturing back toward the cave, issues a series of grunts, clicks, and keening sounds that translate to “That thing you drew on the cave wall. The one that shows you chasing down the triceratops and slaying it with a club?”

He, blinking frantically, a stegosaurus-caught-in-the-headlights look in his eyes, offers his own series of grunts, sniffs, and jowl sounds that offer his retort. “Uh, huh. What about it?”

Grunt, chitter, squawk. “Everybody knows you came across the beast already dead.”

Grunt, grunt, grunt. “Deadish,” he insists. “Possibly expired.”

“Anyway,” she continues with her insistent cave woman exasperation, “I don’t like it on that wall. I want it on the other wall.”

Mankind progressed rapidly from there of course. Soon developing grunt-free language. Nouns, verbs, and metaphors soon rolled from the lips of people through the ages. Useful terms like “zounds” (Gods wounds) “ostler” (like an Elizabethan parking valet) and “Hey nonny, nonny,” (a verse from a medieval pop song “Land of a thousand prances,”) were created, used, then discarded.

And then the idea occurred to someone. What if we could talk to someone who isn’t even in the room? The technology soon leapfrogged from rudimentary two-soup-cans-and-string devices to smoke signals, semaphore flags and then, miracle of miracles, the telegraph. 

Now the most complex messages could be sent hundreds, nay thousands of miles, via a series of dits and dahs through a wire. That no one on the other end had any idea what the dits and dahs meant was an obstacle that took a while to overcome.

After that, it was Katie bar the door. Pony express, wireless radio, the printing press, and poon-shazam Alexander Graham Bell invents THE TELEPHONE! You could now hear the actual voice of a person on the other end asking you if you needed aluminum siding.

Fast forward a century and a half (give or take). From Gilligan’s Island on TV to Spice Girls music videos and movies featuring multiple car crashes, explosions, and snarky super-heroes, we have perfected the art of human communication.

Or have we? With the advent of cell phones and the internet, we can carry on conversations without actually seeing or even knowing who we’re talking to. No longer is it necessary to type actual words to transmit the meaning. “Hw R U. I M fn.” Before long we’re be text-grunting at one another. And emojii’s, those little cartoony hearts, faces and animals will eliminate the need for even the animalisms.

Well, I’m about done ranting. Time for dinner. I think the triceratops should be roasted to perfection about now.