The next g-generation

We were sitting at a gate in the San Francisco airport, waiting for our flight back to North Carolina.

In the seat next to me was a sixytish guy, about my age. I wasn't thinking anything in particular, when I noticed the man's late-teens daughter approach him to ask a question. The girl had an open laptop in her hand, and turned the screen toward her dad.

"Do you have, like, the link to that thing?" she asked

"What are you talking about?" her father replied.

Overhearing this, I was, like, almost lol in the next seat.

I didn't hear her reply, as dad arose and they stepped over to the mother's seat and got into a conversation about something or other. The fact that I find such profound humor in this indicative inter-generational communication is probably why Pat calls me "Mister English person" when she detects my occasional grammatical, syntactic, or definitive hair-splitting.

I suppose we are witnessing, during these times of cataclysmic change (such as David Stockman has documented) the inevitable Deformation of precise English, even as our parents before us had noticed it, and their parents before them, and so forth and so on all the way back to Chaucer or Cicero or Keynes or Krugman or someone like that.

In other news, pronouns are bad for you. I have figured out that they are the diabolical, insidious, imprecise source of, like, multiple myriads of miscommunications. More about that later, dude.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress