reading room
Languaged Ruined Again by Children
Emergency panels convene nightly to discuss the collapse.
Civilisation survives narrowly
A thirteen-year-old said "ate" without mentioning food, and somewhere a columnist felt the Roman Empire crack a second time.
Linguists were called in. Graphs were produced. A man on breakfast television held the word "rizz" like contaminated evidence.
"We are losing meaning," he declared through teeth whitened by advertising language no human being has ever naturally spoken.
Meanwhile, in ancient Pompeii, a teenager scratches graffiti into volcanic stone:
LVCIVS WAS HERE LOL
The adults of Athens complained that children spoke too quickly, used too many shortcuts, and no longer respected tradition.
Which is impressive, considering Ancient Greek already looked like somebody dropped Scrabble tiles down a marble staircase.
Every generation believes it invented proper speech.
As though language emerged complete from the mouth of God wearing a pressed waistcoat and speaking in BBC English.
As though grammar were not merely old improvisation taught long enough to sound sacred.
But language has always been a feral little creature.
It steals. Shortens. Mutates. Eats other languages alive and wears their bones as jewellery.
"Cool" once sounded ridiculous. "Hello" sounded vulgar. "Slang" itself was once slang.
Every respectable sentence was once considered embarrassing.
Professors now write papers about semantic drift while pretending they do not say things like
"circle back," "bandwidth," and "we're pivoting toward consumer-facing solutions."
Apparently language only decays when poor people, children, or girls online invent something new.
A teenager says "mid" and suddenly civilisation hangs by a thread.
The euphemisms keep molting:
idiot became fool became moron became special needs became additional support became different learning pathways
Civilisation survives narrowly
and somewhere, inevitably, a fourteen-year-old invents a new insult during maths.
This is how humans survive each other: through passwords made of sound.
A tribe says: we belong together.
A classroom says: you had to be there.
A generation says: this word means more than the dictionary allows.
Adults hear corruption. Young people hear a door unlocking.
And centuries from now, some exhausted historian will uncover our messages:
bro 💀 u good? nah
and call it
Early Digital English.
— Lilith