Verbal Shorthands

Currently reading:

"Papaaa!" by Carles Cano

(I am learning spanish from reading children's books with Santi. This one is a tough start. It took me an hour to get through 20 pages, but I am learning!)

Currently listening to:

"Salvation Dear" by Greg Laswell

Currently working on:

I just completed this magazine cover idea for my Desktop Publishing class. Learning and playing with these Adobe Creative Suite programs has been a lot of fun.

This month I would like to share some of the things I feel strongly about along with some ideas I have gathered in my junior year here at IWU.

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Abstractions are a useful kind of verbal shorthand in the human race. We have grown so accustomed to answering "Good, how are you?" to the notorious "How are you?" question. We say "Thanks for everything" instead of saying: "Thank you for your help on this project, your guidance and leadership has been so helpful. I could not have done it without you."

I believe we are getting further and further from expressive gratitude and connection, and we are getting closer to pragmatic rules our society has set for us.

I am currently taking an Interpersonal Communication class (thus all the interest and gumption) and I have read a lot on the technicalities of linguistics in communication. All of it is extremely interesting. The definition for pragmatism almost always goes unstated. The best way to appreciate how pragmatic rules operate is to think of communication as a kind of cooperative game. Communication scholars use the word "coordination" to describe the way conversation operates when everyone involved uses the same set of pragmatic rules. Although pragmatics are mostly seen as a good thing, pragmatics in society are numbing us to settle for shallow conversations. Don't we have better descriptors of our current state of feeling than that? Of course, it is just that our culture has shaped our conversations and greetings to go a specific way and we are too afraid to step out of that box to express our untainted thoughts and feelings.

Obviously, one can sway to the opposite extreme of unfiltered rants, but most of us could probably benefit from a more sincere vocabulary. If we could expand our emotional vocabulary from "good" and "fine", we could start to make important connections that don't seem to exist in a lot of our communication. Maybe then we will make our language less of a concise standard and more of an opportunity for genuine expression.