When my friend heard Sam, his 11-year-old grandson, say that he couldn’t think of a title for a school writing assignment, he suggested that the boy call it “a history of the future.”
Sam was momentarily confused, or maybe stunned, but soon snapped out of it and hastened into an adjacent room: “Mom! Grandpa’s at it again!”
Sam may not like the oxymoronic idea, but I’ve seen enough of this moronic world that I believe it could use some oxy. If you didn’t know that “oxy” is a prefix meaning “keen” or “sharp,” and even if you did, what follows is my oxyattempt to imagine myself as an oxyhistorian in the year 2100, starting with a title characteristic of the time:
Duckspeakš – Englishš” – Americanš§
You are now reading an account of the devolution of the English language in America in the 21st Century which has just ended. This is necessarily anonymous because any writing in excess of 20 words is now illegal, and because most of the words I use are not on the list of just 40 words and 12 emojis approved for written communication.
By 2060, so many words were banned that it became easier to consult an approved list which, when last checked in December, 2099, was down to 40 not counting geographical, business, and personal names. All other words have been condemned as “inappropriate” (meaning either offensive or elitist, or confusing or difficult, or pretentious or assuming, or any other reason the speaker may have for not liking it).
After wrestling with “preferred pronouns” in the first three decades of the century, the “Appropriate Police” (AP) banned all singular pronouns and modified “they” to a choice between “o-they” and “p-they,” short for “onethey” and “pluralthey.” Appropriately (consequently), we also have “o-them” and “p-them,” “o-their” and “p-their.” To help the plan along–or perhaps as a result of it–abbreviated spelling was encouraged for many remaining words. “Vacation” became “vaca,” “supermarket” became “supe,” and “government” contracted into “gummint.”
Some words were purged by “Voca-Check” (as in vocabulary), an app perfected in 2035 that replaced them with an AP-appropriate (approved) word. “Citizen” is now automatically turned into “consumer,” “city” becomes “market,” and so forth. Other single words replace inappropriate (detailed) phrases, such as “inflation” for “record-breaking corporate profits.”
Included in this wave of reforms, the letter X is now used to reduce a line such as “he and she repeated it ten times” to “p-they ten-xed o-them.”
In 2040, the AP declared it appropriate (permissible) that all nouns could and should be used as verbs. This grew from a trend started by Madison Avenue soon after the turn of the century to advertise names of seasons, activities, and even of brands being sold as verbs. “In New England, we Honda!” “No matter where you holiday!” “We business for you!” “You’re gonna cashback!”
Punctuation? That was also declared inappropriate (annoying) and banned in the year 2033, following the flurry of reports in the 2020s–ranging from USA Today (now an advertising sheet) to the NY Times (now extinct)–that Gen Z’ers and Millennials found periods rude and abrupt, question marks threatening, and exclamation points better expressed as smiley faces or wow faces or clapping hands, etc.
By 2035, the Chicago Manual of Style, the Associated Press Stylebook, and Strunk & White’s Elements of Style were all deemed inappropriate (obsolete) and replaced by Emoji Protocol. In addition to the twelve emojis appropriate (approved) for public consumption (i.e. social media), Protocol offers a “relatively alternative history” of emojis based on what it calls “re-evolution.” In it, all alphabets are devolved from hieroglyphics, which was a higher form of expression than anything penned on paper, typed on keyboards, or written on subway walls and tenement halls. Shakespeare be not!
Emojis, according to Protocol, have put a halt to this devolution. Hence, the claim to re-evolution. In 2055, when everything ceased to be printed, the images of book covers on the screen were called “Cuneiform Art,” and used mostly as cartoons. The first Samsung mobil device from the century’s first decade, because it was the only one to ever include semi-colons, became a prized collector’s item–so rare, that it is called “The Rosetta Phone.”
In addition to making the world appropriate (safe) from punctuational abuse, all adjectives with one or two exceptions (depending on how you count) were banned in 2040. All were found to be inappropriate (judgmental). By 2025, words such as “stupid” and “ignorant” were banned as name-calling and/or because they made people feel bad. That done, the self-appointed AP then cracked down on the implication of complimentary words. No more calling anyone “smart” because it implies that others are not smart.
All now-banned adjectives that once described a person’s abilities or attributes–intellectual, physical, artistic, artisanal, social, personal, creative, imaginative–are listed in an appendix to the AP Appropriatebook. A second list includes descriptive verbs, and a third adds adverbs that describe the subject as much as the verb. The three-part, 12-page appendix is titled, “Everyone Trophys.”
The excepted–and accepted–adjective is “appropriate,” the lone approved word to be applied to anything the speaker favors. This includes “inappropriate” for anything not favored. Young people and older folks who want to sound young may use “cool” and “uncool.” These serve as oxysynonyms, which is to say that they have the same meaning only because, like “appropriate” and “inappropriate,” they mean nothing, the inevitable result of being used to mean everything.
As far back as 1977, before the century-long purge of American English began, as a reaction to a national economic decline that squeezed state budgets, college deans started using “appropriate” to mean anything that met their approval. The purposefully vague value judgement of the word allowed them to assume agreement, avoiding any inappropriate (inconvenient) debate precipitated by words such as “relevant” or “engaging.”
Even more appropriately (sanitizing) than that, the all-purpose word offers nothing precise, or that can be measured in any way, unlike words such as “urgent” or “challenging” for values once at the heart of education but which proved too inappropriate (complex, uncomfortable) after the inappropriate (troublesome) Sixties. The world of business quickly picked up on “appropriate,” finding it both appropriate (efficient) and appropriate (cost-effective), and public officials soon followed suit when “appropriate” proved to be an appropriate (reliable) way to perplex reporters asking inappropriate (revealing) questions.
By 2050, a few elderly cranks were protesting what they called “dumbed down language” and comparing it to the “Doubleplusgood Duckspeak” forecast by George Orwell in 1984, perhaps the most renowned “history of the future” ever written. But the protest backfired when college students noted that Duckspeak didn’t offend anyone and that ducks made “doubleplusgood emojis.”
In 2057, Ding Dong, the student newspaper of Dog and Dinnerbell Univerity, called Duckspeak “the most appropriate (simple) language for safespace.” A tide began to surge. In 2059, Dingaling, the AI algorithm that provides content for student papers with options allowing editors to make it appropriate (relevant) to individual schools, offered a feature calling 1984 “not the warning that liberals always hate on, but a blueprint to rock America!”
By 2064, a new political party emerged from the cold ashes of the Democratic Party that committed political suicide–by pitting an insistance on immediate perfection against a willingness to accept accesssible good–mixed with the confused mush of MAGA, a cult that smothered and replaced the Republican Party while retaining its name. Riding the tide set by D&DU, Dingaling renamed it The Duckspeak Party.
By 2068, enough Americans were so in love with the ease, so enthralled with the oblivion, so convinced of the freedom, and so protective of the right not to care about anything other than themselves that the Duckspeak tide proved a tsunami. English drowned as America began to be ruled by whatever algorithms Dingaling could set. Politicians existed only as fronts, chosen for their entertainment value and their fluency in Duckspeak such as:
I have broken more Elton John records, he seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I donāt have a musical instrument. I donāt have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No weāve broken a lot of records. Weāve broken virtually every record. Because you know, look, I only need this space. They need much more room. For basketball, for hockey and all of the sports, they need a lot of room. We donāt need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really we do it without like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical: the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth. Right? The brain, more important than the mouth, is the brain. The brain is much more important.*
Whether there’s a brain attached or not, Duckspeak was deemed “doubleplus appropriate” because it simplified everything. Comparisons, no matter how slight, were effectively banned because they could no longer be considered anything other than full-blown equations. State any rhetorical or symbolic similarity between MAGA at the beginning of the past century and the Nazis in the previous century, and you were slammed for accusing MAGA of running gas chambers. Fascists rose to power in the early 21st Century because their tactics could not be mentioned in the same sentence as those used by early-20th Century fascists to gain power. Hence, whole populations fell for the same deceptions. Instead of learning from history, we fell off the Cliff Notes of easy-does-it denial.
Ditto explanations. Documented reports of the violence caused by corruption of Central American governments were dismissed as excuses for an “invasion” of America’s southern border. No one wanted to hear of the US government’s decades-long relations to or meddling in places like Guatemala or Honduras. “Just an excuse!” Calls to stop genocidal bombing in Gaza were twisted into accusations of anti-Semitism even as Jewish people joined in those calls. You might as well call for a second Holocaust. And let’s have no talk of the Mediterranean oil fields off Gaza’s coast that Israel will not allow the Palestinians to drill. Context means nothing. Cause-and-effect relationships have ceased to exist.
In America’s 21st Century, Truth itself became nothing more than a weak-kneed excuse. Any comparison to history was deemed offensive. There is no past. Nor is there a future. That’s why it’s so easy to write a “history of the future,” a phrase that only appears to contradict itself while offering its very appearance as a verbal trick.
There is only Now.
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*Donald Trump, rally in Montana, July 5, 2018.
Mouth of the River 