IS ANYONE LOOKING AHEAD

Reading a few weeks ago about university professors lamenting about the practically non-existent grasp of English language and English usage – grammar, syntax etc , I paused to ponder how we are either afflicted with a generation of “don’t care,” or we are being carped at by too-finicky academics. Somewhere in between lies another truth: the failure to look outside the present.

As the self-anointed seer of forward thinking, I am entitled to stand it on its end. Here goes: the principle of Looking Ahead was, as it says here on my blog page, to help people retired or about to retire, to be forward-looking. That idea is based on the assumption that too many of us spend time living in the past and not nearly enough developing new skills and pursuing new ideas. Of course there are many who do, but I suspect just as many who don’t. They are the kinds of people they make Miami Beach jokes about. Get up in the morning conversation: so what’ll we have for breakfast? Breakfast table conversation: so what’ll be for lunch? Lunchtime conversation – well you get the idea.

Enough backing and filling. There is another aspect of Looking Ahead: how much of it does the generation with the world in front of them do? We all grew up believing in our twenties that we were immortal and bulletproof. The idea of planning for retirement was a remote as proposing an intense study of calculus for dummies. Even in thirties and forties, there is a kind of reluctance to plan ahead. Life is here today. Pleasure is in the here and now. Eat, drink and be merry….

At the simplest level: language. The academics complain that a generation educated mainly by television and the internet and text messaging and the bumper-sticker profundities of Twitter, see no reason to include language as a part of communication. I sent off a copy of an Op-Ed piece from the N, .Y. Times to a younger relative. I got an answer – sent of course by Blackberry: “Thks 4 the pce.” This horrible shorthand is not language. We may as well be grunting instead of speaking. It has its comic moments. Someone on TV promoting service on a product: “We’re at your disposal 24 hours a day seven days a week 24/7. They used them both, apparently having forgotten what “24/7” stands for. My piano teacher, who does not represent himself as a scholar (he’s a superb jazz pianist) laments that his kids now call their mother Mom – with the “O” rhyming with the O in bomb, as compared to what we always used to say: Mum. They get it from TV. Another one he quotes is that his kids, Canadian to the core, have dropped the long “e’ as in “thee edge” and have Americanized themselves with “thuh edge.”
Education by TV should be considered a form of child abuse. In the word “mush” the “u” is pronounced to rhyme with slush. Right? Wrong. Wrong if you watch TV shows like The Food Network. An entirely new a totally illogical Americanization of English has happened. In the word “mush” the “u” is pronounced like the “u” in “push.”
But when it comes to the middle eastern favourite hummus – when there “u” should be pronounced like the “u” in “push” it is pronounced like the “u” in “rush.”
I giggle at it, but I worry that this misuse will be engraved on the minds of more people and will become part of what I hate to call “the evolution” of language. We can all look ahead to people who don’t know how to spell and don’t know the difference between Aphrodite and apostrophe.

Taking just one more look at the failure to look ahead. The fine art if self-decoration has reached epidemic proportions, exceeding, I believe the ritual tattooing common among Polynesians. It is a decoration for the “here and now.” Get something colourful at 25 and by the time you are 45 all the colours have faded, and the lines have started to bleed. That’s the way I remember old tattoos. Maybe the techniques have changed and the coiled multi-coloured sea monster will still be as radiant thirty years from now as it is today. Then of course, the failure to look ahead is just as evident that a 22 year old who branded him/herself today may find that the fashions dies in 20 years and they’re stuck looking like a relic of the first decade of the crazy 21st century. It’s a bit like the 60 year old guys who are totally bald on top for still wear the ponytail labeling them forever as members of the Woodstock/protest generation.

I’m still looking ahead. Despite aches and pains and the imminence of more declines, the 4 month trip to Paris is still on. The work toward fluency is still in place. And I still practice the piano every day – well nearly.

By the way, an “anonymous” comment on my blog suggested I should make myself visible on Twitter. I can’t get it all said in ten words or less. What do you think?