The Twittersphere

Rocking Robin, the rock ‘n roll hero from the sixties, has come alive and is now dominating our language in one hundred and forty characters. Characters! The hundred and forty is not limited to words, but characters. This means every symbol on the keyboard is in play. Rocking is imposing it rules on our language, reducing words to letters and forcing adjectives, adverbs, participles and the lowly gerund into extinction.

Prepositions are allowed, they are short. What in the world is a wordsmith to do?  Our beloved Holy Book, the dictionary, is taking a severe beating. Those of us who love an elegant sentence must unite to overthrow this egregious oppression of our right to write run along sentences. The joy of finding a new word and getting to its root may be lost forever if we do not do something. We must fight back against the tyrannical rule of Rocking and its hundred and forty characters. It’s not too late. 

Leisurely, “down the country lane’ sentences are gone. Nowhere on the horizon of language can be found the compound sentence, and the complex sentence is abolished altogether. The formerly punctuation marks are now designated as words; made to convey meaning for which they were never intended. The use to which they were intended is that of highlighters and 'accentuators' of meaning, not words.  How do we get out from under this calamitous tyranny of the hundred and forty characters? How can a person convey the why of a statement in one hundred and forty characters?

Could Tolstoy have written the great opus War and Peace in a hundred and forty characters? And the scriptures from around the world, could they have been written in a hundred and forty characters? I need to hear from the holy folks from the past and they cannot be reduced to a hundred and forty characters. Imagine the guiding words, of The Buddha, Jesus, Mohamed, Krishna and the hundreds of other holy folk from down the ages, crammed into a hundred and forty characters. Personally I cannot. Therefore, I am in the fight.

From this moment on I will only write lengthy letters, send detailed emails and write long complicated sentences. And no, Mr. Rocking, I will not tell you ‘what’s happening’. You can cram that into one hundred and forty characters if you can.

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