Hacker News Reader

Comment by Foobar8568 | Hacker News Reader

Before the 60s/70s, most interactions were through either radio or books. Then TV and now internet. Check the vocabulary used in these different eras and generations. At least, as a French, I can see large differences across generations.

The downfall of book sales and libraries marks the end of good literacy.

View on HN

Having watched some interviews with people around that time or just tv programmes, it's just sad how we managed to go from eloquent language to dumb, three word expressions dominating today's world.

Why? For entertainment sure. But I fail to see the advantage of using "pretty" words when they don't convey additional meaning.

Probably because it sounds different, even foreign. If that was their language reality, they'd be out praising other way of speaking -- perhaps contemporary simplicity. You know, the greener grass is always where you're not.

I think the advantage of the "pretty" words is that they can, in fact, convey additional meaning. It seems to me that people in general used to be have a far richer vocabular at their disposal. This allowed for fantastic nuance in conversation. The careful (but wholly instinctive) choice of words enabled a speaker to express complex thoughts and opinions through intimation and subtext.

Nowadays, sarcasm is frequently employed for a similar purpose, but it's a much blunter tool. Note also the ubiquity of hyperbole: anything that people want to express approval of, no matter how banal or quotidian, is declared to be "incredible", "amazing", "game-changing". If something genuinely amazing comes along, how are we to describe it?

This sparked a thought in me. Sarcasm, irony, and hyperbole; the three most common tools used to express depth of emotion. Each of which, coincidentally, is a way of speaking something untrue. But no one even considers them untruths any more; even calling out hyperbole as literally, factually, false is weird to do. There is no expectation of literal truth in any sort of speech. Words are used mainly for emotive value (I remember a rap critic, distressed at nonsense strings of words a rapper was using in order to rhyme, crying out "Words mean things, dammit!") rather than as vessels to convey information, because their carrying capacity has been heavily degraded. Strange.

Have you guys ever thought that maybe you just aren't able to perceive the differences in modern speech and vocab because you choose not to? Maybe viewing the past the way you are kinda leads itself to not enjoying the modern world to the extent that you possibly could. Speech evolves in ways that are often very challenging to perceive, particularly if you think of modern society as somehow dumber and less apt to convey emotions through language which mostly comes off as the opinions of someone who somehow thinks that language only works "one way" aka the way they were taught it works, and the way that they personally speak in. In the example you're using here with the rap critic, words do have meaning, and playing with that meaning or lack of meaning is just as interesting and intelligent as some rural turn of phrase, and also isn't a very new concept if you're younger than say 150.

From the video (01:40) when the headmistress of the school in Wales calls the girl "indolent and feckless" it is a rich and meaningful accusation (rightly or wrongly) that today would more likely be dumbed down into "stupid".

This short video has many such examples that offer a high level of precision in everyday communication that seems rarely achieved today.

I'm not sure "indolent and feckless" is much more descriptive than "lazy and unmotivated." Modern American English likes adding prefixes (-un) and suffixes (-ated) to everything, which I find clutteratedizing, but such language still communicates meaning.

I'd hazard a guess that - at the time in which they were commonly used - "indolent and feckless" described character traits (or habits of behaviour) whereas "lazy and unmotivated" described individual behaviours.

If I take a 2 hour lunch one day and don't make my 1pm meeting, it's lazy. If I generally only make 10% of my meetings for that reason, it's indolent.

These days "lazy" is used equally for either a single behaviour or a habitual behaviour. The meaning has to be inferred from context, which makes it less accurate than the above definitions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com