Dear People of the Future;
07/14/2022
“All words are made up” - Thor
I am writing this around 5 AM, on Thursday, July 14th 2022. (If you’re wondering, I have terrible insomnia, and my sleep schedule is a complete wreck.)
Feeling a lot better than I did last night. Yesterday I finally gave up and put the window unit AC back in my bedroom, and slept in my bed for the first time since I got central air right before a heatwave that made my bedroom grossly hot. So that was good. We’ll see how bad my electric bill is. It’s always unsurprising when you take care of something real low on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and suddenly everything is better. Imagine. (Hopefully books that explain Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs have survived to your future. If not, man what happened?)
But anyway, let’s go back to Thor and Everything’s Made Up, and my favorite Thor quote.
Part of me hopes that somehow this writing makes its way to a future where all copies of Avengers: Infinity War have been lost, just so I can tell you that it was a big summer blockbuster movie where a giant purple guy collected 6 magic rocks so he could kill half the universe, and the good guys tried to stop him.
At one point Thor, a magic space viking and god of thunder, is talking to Rocket Racoon, a cyborg space racoon, and they have the following exchange:
Rocket Racoon: “That’s a made up word!”
Thor: “All words are made up.”
It’s the smallest throwaway joke, that just goes by and the story continues, and I was so happy to see it in a big dumb spectacle movie.
All words are made up.
But it’s true. (At least as far as I know. If when I die I come face to face with The Word God, I will do my best to haunt people and let them know.) Despite quoting a fictional version of a god that was once worshiped for real (and still is in small circles), I don’t believe words were handed down from Up On High. Language isn’t a divine gift, it’s a thing humans made up so that we could communicate with each other.
Which of course means that all the rules of grammar are made up, and the only thing that’s “correct” is whatever we collectively agree to. Everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.
Hopefully in the future everyone has come around to how the singular “They” is really fucking useful, and was around long before it was “wrong”, but in the early 21st century we still have people arguing against it, as if there’s some actual truth to the English language, and the rules aren’t just something that racist, imperialist nerds thought up 150 years ago.
We have people that argue that different dialects are incorrect, that African American English is spoken incorrectly, despite having its own linguistic rules and traditions.
Those people are full of shit, because all words are made up.
There’s no true, real version of English that somehow exists independently of humans making shit up. The only correct language is if someone understands what you’re trying to say.
Language always evolves, language always changes to fit the needs of the people using it to communicate with each other.
I hope that in the future, some nerd has the job of translating this writing into modern 25th Century English or MutantCockroach-Speech or whatever. I hope that in 150 years, this text looks as strange and old timey as an Edgar Allan Poe story looks to me.
And as always I hope that you have abandoned the stupid rules that you don’t need, and evolved ways of talking and writing that fit your world. Because all words are made up, and the points do not matter.
—
Next time: I don’t know, at some point I really want to write about the ongoing slow motion coup happening in the US, where Republicans are attempting to install a one party white supremacist fascist theocratic kleptocracy, but I might write about something less serious.
Take care of yourselves, future people. It’s rough out there.
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