Its progression certainly brings about interesting phenomena. Like the fact that I can say “chilling (but not Netflix and chilling) with the fam” and have someone my age understand me, but my parents look at me like I’m nuts. Of course, I give them funny looks when they say things like “far out” or “hot dog” out of nowhere, so I suppose turnabout is fair play.
But to be entirely honest, it’s very disconcerting to realize that my generation is now old enough to be creating our own slang. Oh, don’t get me wrong – slang is fun, and helpful in capturing meaning, no matter how ungrammatically correct it may be.
But somehow, the aspect of it that stands out the most is how someday in the near future, it will become obsolete. Someday, everything will turn around until I’m on the other side of the confusion – unable to keep up, instead of unable to remember.
Again, linear time and our existence in it is at fault. Just as one moment invariably gives way to the next, changing from “now” to “then,” so does one era inevitably become a time of embarrassing memories and foreign expressions. Or so it seems.
But the other interesting thing about linear time and the way it progresses is that it allows for change. Everything, including language, builds on what came before it, and in turn creates the future.
You’d have to ask someone who knows more about quantum physics than I do if you’re curious what the options aside from linear would be, but I can only imagine that either nothing would have happened, or everything that could happen already has and is simply continuing to happen all at once.
Whether it would be one of those modes of existence, or some other option I can’t possibly conceive of, the evolution of language wouldn’t be as much fun.
Consider slang as an example – not just short-lived catchphrases, but more enduring words. Nowadays, describing something new and interesting as “cool” hardly causes an eyelash to bat, but someone who lived before the 1950s would be confused why you chose an adjective they only associate with temperature. That just brushes the surface of phrases or words that are created every decade to describe something new and interesting in new and interesting ways.
Every word was a neologism at some point – a brandnew turn of phrase or arrangement of letters. And in linear time, past moments may vanish, but the memories remain – often because of memorable language – until it becomes impossible to imagine a world, or a word, without a past.
— Nina Collay is a junior at Thornton Academy who can frequently be found listening to music, reading, wrestling with a heavy cello case, or poking at the keyboard of an uncooperative laptop.
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