Vocabulary

I am worried about my declining vocabulary. In ordinary day to day conversation I probably use less than a handful of words; in written communication, I use even less. Today, I shall begin with beautiful generalizations and what used to be called twenty-five cent words but now due to inflation and other societal abnormalities are known as five dollar words.

Yesterday, during a friendly morning interrogation about life, sacrifice, and duty, I was asked where did I see myself in two years. My first instinctive rocket-acellerating response which flashed in my brain and anesthetized all other thought was “In two years I want to be doing something that is good. I want to be doing something to help people, performing some service for God. I don’t have an action plan yet. I want to formulate a response that reflects modernity’s heterogeneity’s need for God’s mercy and grace.” Luckily I never shared this jumbled bit of confusion.

Off and on for the rest of the day, my mind was subjected to many similar vague but good intentioned etherizations. I could not protest. I could only search for distractions. How concentric modern thought is! How circuitous modern avoidance is! How circumlocutory modern dialogue is! I searched for a sense of equilibrium.

We live in a time of anarchical bargaining. Social responsibility and social morality have been locked outside. Everything is permissible, everything is allowed except good common sense. Some people seem to wallow and flourish in the modern cultural imperialism of angst, nihilism, and preemptive strikes. Populism no longer rules; it just waits to take polls.

And I exist within this world of rhetorical questions in conflict, this world of rheumatic fever and mother’s apron strings delusions. Every tongue has a wound; every dream was savagely punctured; every heart tells tales out of the operating room, before the surgery begins. I listen to the stories about Thucydides on the Potomac, Nobel Prize preferences, naturalism, consumerism, fascism, Admiral Horatio Nelson, Ponce de Leon, Robinson Crusoe, Jane Addams, demonstrative adjectives, Betty Friedan, genetic engineering, Bourbon kings, perfectibility of man, skepticism, and take-home pay.

Sometimes I can not respond coherently in complete sentences. I force some little sound from my throat which hopefully is appropriate to the situation.

And so all I can do is pray and suggest that they pray.

Outside I can hear the hiss as automobiles drive through the puddles in the alley. And my telephone rings. I remember yesterday’s friendly morning interrogation about where did I see myself in two years. In two years I want to pray more than I am praying today.