Are You Speechless?

Reading

As in, do you not have enough vocabulary?

I can see why, you don’t read enough books.

And after correcting the social science papers of my students almost a month ago, I feel obliged to write on this topic. Not that they did not have enough words to use to answer the questions but the words that were being used were not spelt right. And the students in question are tenth graders, high schoolers, grown well over the age of ten and twelve, really- the maximum age that I expect silly spelling mistakes are from twelve year olds. 

But fifteen year olds? You all need to know the spelling of soldiers please! 

I have seen, and it was predicted, the there would be a decline of big words used in everyday vocabulary. Back in the 19th and 18th century, now considered ‘old times’ people, educated people, would use big words in their everyday speech, what children nowadays consider ‘big words’. Words such as ‘comprehend’ and ‘endeavor’ now confuses and complicates sentences for the children. And that is not good. Such words are not meant to be complicated. In case you don’t understand what these mean, they mean ‘to understand’, and ‘to try’ respectively. 

And why do these seem complicated? Because of the lack of reading in today’s world. Instead of constantly blabbering about the advantages of daily reading here, as you must have supposed, I will take on another whole topic. That is, the speed of time. 

Time

Another fact that has come to my notice is the that the pace of almost anything and everything has quickened, including conversation. To convey a message as fast as possible, a lot of people these days use short forms. Unfortunately for me, I don’t understand these short forms, and am mocked for being a ‘boomer’ that I am NOT. I am not all that old. You, the reader, might have noticed that through the words I have used in the first two posts, am I right? I hope you did. 

Anyhow, I had recently watched a movie, a kids’ movie called ‘K-pop Demon Hunters’ and though I find the movie to be slightly better than most movies of the 2020s, I did feel the fastness of the pacing. As a person who still reads the novels of good old Sherlock Holmes, I think it is only natural that I find the story going too fast. But other factors contribute too, such as fast entertainment- reels, fast action packed stories, children’s cartoons in YouTube being a fast paced model so as to not bore the viewers and so on. 

Honestly speaking, the fast pace confused my brain and in the end, I could only understand what mainly happened and not a thing of how it happens. I do not understand what ‘honmoon’ is, for instance, and I think that is one of the main concepts of the story that I am supposed to understand. The three characters were trying to seal the ‘honmoon’ or do something similar but, I didn’t get a clear understanding of the situation either, my apologies.

So, what I am trying to point out here is, read more books and go a bit slow with life, will you? I am still trying to catch up. 

For today, I am done blabbering. The rest are for later.