Words are beautiful. From a young age, I found myself an avid reader with a strong vocabulary, and that passion has lasted my entire life. Today, I am stunned at how much information we can access, and it’s all because we have a language, both oral and written, that contains agreed-upon meanings, spellings, grammar, and punctuation. We are capable of taking our most abstract thoughts and sharing them clearly with others, an act that no other species has mastered to remotely near the level we have attained.

Now, I accept that people are going to make alterations to language. I’m no linguistic historian, but I assume that language has always shifted shape to accommodate common conventions, slang, and the like. It disgusts me that D’oh is in the dictionary, but I’m clearly not Noah bloody Webster (or Nelly American Heritage for that matter) so I don’t get a say in the process. And I also know that when I was a kid-through-teen, I had all kinds of ridiculous words flop eerily from my lips, a part of some attempt to be cool and use the common lingo.

Still, I hate the way people, particularly teenaged girls, talk these days. And it started with my own daughter. When The Spazz came to live with me, she used the word epic. She had no idea what epic meant, just that it was a word that meant “cool”. This is odd, thought I. I have read several epics, and most of them were not cool at all. I’m looking at you, Homer. I tried to explain to her what epic meant, and she looked at each of my three heads with equal disdain. Clearly, despite being the coolest person on earth, I’m an epic lame to my daughter.

Then she began to play with the word. I’m sure she didn’t do it on her own, and am nowhere near claiming that any of the creations were hers, but she settled on epical and epicalness. The epicalness of my lasagna, for example, was epic. I cringed myself to sleep.

And then I overheard girls talking on the bus. This is their conversation:

Girl 1: OMG [she actually said Oh-Emm-Gee] so this like random guy the other day just like randomly walked up to me and was randomly asking me things.

Girl 2: LOL [in this case, she said lol, as in the short if lollipop] that is so weird.

Girl 1: I know, right? He was so random, and he kept just like randomly asking these random questions, so I was like, “Uh, bro, you’re random” and he had like nothing to say.

Girl 2: That’s so random!

Random. It’s a perfectly sensible word. As a computer geek, I understand random. Hell, as a guy who has been kicked in the slats by life more times than is necessary, I have a good understanding of random. These girls? They did not. And I wanted to sell them to a random slaver who would randomly send them to some random country to live with a random dude who randomly beat them with random weapons. Epically.

I understand the spastic nature of pubescent children. I get that their codes are used for both inclusion and exclusion. I get that this is how they are wired. But still, it pisses me off.

So please, obnoxious children of the world, if you are going to take an already existing word and turn its meaning into something you can comprehend (but that is utterly wrong), wait until I have my headphones in. I just can’t stomach listening to your blather.

Jim