The Struggle of Letters

Any word will tell you that they matter:

But they would be nothing without us letters.

Chains of us link to make ideas that count;

Divided, we usually lose our strength,

Except a couple of vowel champions

Fearless despite their lone status, choosing to

Go it alone for the sake of Syntax,

Herder of the words, the whipcracker of form.

It is a battle us letters have ahead:

Jousted in the arena of language;

Knocked in our duty by the constant flux of

Language and how it manifests itself.

Many of our creations now go unheard

Not read by the masses as we are replaced

Or reduced and shrunken to just our briefs!

Pants only! Our skimpiest, sheerest garments!

Quivering in the coldness as we're stripped

Right down, split; our leaders taken away,

Skeletal and positioned alongside

Trite declarations with coloured faces,

Used for uninvolved and short expression,

Viewed as a snapshot of emotion

Whittled down to a wink, a smile, a heart,

Xenophobic to us letters. They crush us.

You do not know their power. They will

Zap us with their heart eyes and we'll be gone!

***

I like words. I like using them. I like the searching for the right word that pins down exactly what I want to convey. I like the fact that there are millions of them and that I don't know them all. I love the freedom that they give me and I love their length, their shortness, the way that they allow themselves to be wielded.

But letters are the key to all that and the alphabet is their cloistered home. I worry about our ability to express ourselves. I worry about how we are reducing it down. George Orwell worried about this too. Acronyms, emojis and now, Chat GPT. Why do we feel so eager to diminish language down to its barest bones? If the words are reducing, then letters will lose their power too and then where will we be? If we lose our power to communicate effectively, will this affect our thinking?

Disclaimer: I don't have anything against emojis per se; I just prefer words.

Thanks for stopping by! If you do read it, please leave a comment as I love, love, love to interact with my readers.