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A rose by any other name...

The English language continues to morph over time. Cultural attitudes, technology, political events - they all play into a constantly evolving lexicon from which we draw.

One of my big concerns revolves around the truncation of words and the deliberate absence of punctuation in texts, a phenom that I've also seen leaking into personal emails..and that makes me shiver. Using appropriate style for different venues makes sense, I just wonder where the line will be drawn, if it will be drawn at all or if our more formal missives will eventually resemble stream of consciousness flows of words sans commas and parens and periods and such. Will it all become like a bad homage to e e cummings with the added twist of no instructions for how to weight or pace, and therefore truly understand written thoughts? Will we end up masters of poetic interpretation in spite of our notable avoidance of iambic pentameter or haiku structure?

I am a language lover, and spent far too many hours studying literature and grammar in my undergrad years. I love language, how it's structured, how it functions to convey the very essence of our humanity and allows us to share our deepest musings. I love cadence and alliteration, nicely balanced prose and elegantly crafted poetry. I derive a deep satisfaction from feeling a piece of writing as I'm wending my way through the intended message...I appreciate nicely structured sentences, well-placed adjectives and eloquently phrased sentiments. I just do.

Words are fun to play with, and so are meanings..turns of phrase, irony and other devices allow us to banter and joust with words in most delightful ways. My favorite new weird word tumbled from the mouth of a dear friend's teenage daughter during dinner the other night. She was referring to another teenage girl, one for whom she held a marked amount of disdain, and she called her a slooter. A slooter.

So of course I had to ask...what the heck is that? What is a slooter?

She grinned, then said, 'Well, I kinda made it up. It's one of those words that comes from a couple of words mashed together...it's like slut and hooker..but slooker doesn't sound as cool as slooter so I just went with that instead.'

So does to sloot mean to be slutty for money? And is one a sloot if one practices slooting on a regular basis? Apparently the term is loose enough to bend to the current context, which makes sense since the creator of a term like this prefers flexibility when it comes to applying the term. In this case, literal interpretation isn't really the point, the intent is the point.

Which makes a strange kind of sense if you think about it.

 

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