Other Disappearing Entities
Thinking about disappearing definitions makes me think of other things that seem to be disappearing...not all that relative to grammar, but man am I sad that analog is being replaced with digital. People keep blogs instead of journals, Facebook albums instead of photo albums, they want to chirp me instead of have lunch with me. I mean, the internet is all well and good...fabulous. I love googling things. I love that "googling" is a word. Is that in the dictionary yet? Who invented google? I'll google it later...but having everything digitalized, googlized and internetalized (another one to replace a forgotten word in the dictionary) makes me nervous. "I sent you an email," but my mailbox I open with a key is still only stuffed full of newspapers.
I tell everyone who keeps a blog, be careful. The internet will explode one day and everything you write on it will be gone... They then ask me, "Well, what if your house catches on fire? Or floods? Then all your journals will be gone too." Yeah, well, I'm pretty sure it's more likely that the internet will explode than my house will catch on fire. Don't you remember Y2K?
My point being, disappearing definitions makes me sad and so does disappearing other things. I'm torn becuase I'm nostalgic for the days when encyclopedias were comprised of what one lonely explorer had seen and attempted to describe and we all had to take their word on it, yet I love bing albe to read the Wikipedia article on Scientology. I think we all like nostalgia; that's why people wear Mario Brothers t-shirts and hang up N'Sync posters. So, I guess all this change and replacing is good if only to give people something to miss.