l a n g u a g e a f t e r t h e 1 0 0 y e a r w a r
The Nouns were in control in the neighborhood of Verbiage.
Adjectives were forced to end their 100 Year War.
This war was known as the Great War of Planet Earth in the Days of Rhetoric Only.
Verbiage, like a fireplace bellows of yesteryear,
had simply exhausted its wheeze and could no longer
control the Nation.
Politicians would no longer be described adjectively.
Thus, our President could be described by the Press as, “A
man whose eyes narrowed when a syllabic word entered the
toy store of his mind; a man whose Rubber Ducky drowned
when his bath water became higher than what is necessary for
the average leader; or, a man who could bob eternally on the
Ocean of Platitude.”
This leader called up his country’s Reserve Marines again.
These Marines were sent to a land which resembled a cannon
to which they would become fodder. They would obey their
mission, climb into these cannons, and be shot out over the
land of buildings which no longer resembled buildings.
Naught would be seen but structures of rubble which resembled
cookies crumbled in the hand of a monster as tall as the
sky.
The Congress would not be allowed to use descriptions
which included the much abused adjective. This caused some
consternation, for our Congress knew of the paucity of adverbs
when running for election. The Congress member
would no longer be able to crawl into that vat of adjectives
filled with words guaranteed to portray an individual Congress
person righteously and puffily. These adjectives, I might
add, are thrown carelessly into this vat, like screen plays in
Los Angeles, like potato chips in a Lays truck which had escaped
from their Bag Containers.
The Nouns issued an edict: “Stick to the Facts, Jack.
Straight Facts for a Straight Land,” a land which had lived adjectivally
and splendiferously for too long, thereby wreaking
an ecological knowledge gap of a very long five years. Politicians
had appeared on the NewsHour program with Jim
Lehrer, and on what used to be Peter Jennings’s NewsHour,
and on Tim Russert, to reveal Sunday after Sunday (or was it
Monday after Monday?) narrow gamboling minds and nuances
of the political dance. These very same politicians verbally
trolled linguistically along to thinly expand titles such as
“Theatre of Operation,” “War Games” and, last but not least,
the most abused noun in the world, Democracy—Democracy
became a gutted, slutty word, misused and stretched like
hardened taffy in a candy machine after the summer crowd
had gone home.
A rape of the Nouns had occurred. What choice did the
Nouns have but to take over the Nation? They cried out,
“Aack, aack, aack! No more.”
And so as this tale is difficultly told, but blessed for its attempts,
all the while failing in adverbial splendor, time will tell how language
controlled its environment so that facts and integrity might emerge again
children of the world forget that “Truthfulness is the foundation
of all human virtues” (Ruhi Book 1 – Reflections on the Life of the Spirit)