Brief blurbs on brevity

*msn: Shooting up the melancholia – overdosing on the pain

Some days I miss the books I read when I was young – Dickens, Bronte (all of them), Doyle and Poe; especially when I read the books I read now that I’m not all that young anymore.

It seems to me that there are a whole lot less words nowadays, with prose so short and terse it seems the whole point is to get the point across, and nothing more. With words once ugly and discordant now written for the newness and the jarringly trendiness of them all.

Which is not to say that clean and simple words can’t be beautiful, but simply that they not always are these days.

Language written like sung silk slipping off leaves and sheaves of paper become rarer by the day.

Stories spun of old and tired plots, of Guy Meets Girl and Girl Meets Guy, of cliched angst and chic chick lit are common as carbon, with diamonds few and thinly spread.

Why the brevity? Why the coarseness of instant literary gratification? Why the hurriedness of e-mails and the complete reluctance to type out words in full?

Science and medicine have made our lives all the longer, but the words with which we fill it seem to diminish both in size and quality by the day.

Some people don’t fill it with words at all, more’s the pity.

Book-based movies and summaries abound, and the original print-captured songs die a silent death. (Of silence. Haha.)

This makes me sad, and mad, but, mostly, I regret forgetting such old friends in favour of the quick and snappy acquaintances I forget soon after parting.

This also scares me, especially when I think of how it will be a hundred years from now.

What words will we lose next? What little ways in which to say the things we want to say would go? And then how would we say them?

Orwell’s frightening premonition of Newspeak rings a distant, hollow, war drum song.