i'm getting sea sick

can somebody tell me what in the hell a "sea change" is? the term has been appearing with alarming frequency in my hometown newspaper, the san francisco chronicle. search their web site if you don't believe me. three sea changes just last week! everything from minimum wage laws to american reading tastes is sea changing like there's no tomorrow, and you and i don't even know what that is!

concerned? you should be! show me a once great civilization moldering in the compost pile of history, and i'll show you a civilization where people didn't know how to communicate clearly with one another.

picture this, mezoamerica, 1519, guy walks into the neighboring village and says, "there's this dude named cortez with a handful of pastyfaced drunks causing trouble down the road, can you help us out?"

guy in the neighboring village says, "sorry. due to history of socio-cultural isolation, i no speaka you language, hold on while i find a, how you say, tranz-a-lay-dor."

think it can't happen here? sure we live in a largely monolingual country, but the human potential movement, celebrity interviews and other sources of mindless blather have dilluted american english down to about one part meaning to 412 parts obfuscating twaddlish filler. for example, has anyone ever conveyed any real information to you in a sentence that began with the words "it's all about"?

"it's all about transpositioning the nouveau-feminist status quo, steve."

how about when somebody uses the word "disconnect" as a noun, as in "Where Dolan perceives synergy between speaker and speechwriter, others hear a disconnect."? i didn't make that up. the chronicle picked it up from a.p. today. ("Presidential speechwriter infuses Bush's addresses with gentle spirituality", Sandra Sobieraj, 21 July 2001.) disconnects are another of those mysterious phenomena i'm always reading about in the chron. i have no idea what they are. could have something to do with the world supply of artichoke hearts for all i know.

don't even get me started on the inanity that is "postmodern." is that something that used to be modern but isn't modern anymore? or is that the stuff that's going to be modern after all our currently modern stuff becomes antique?

and in 100 years will your postmodern art, literature and coffee table become post-postmodern? or pre-postmodern?

and will it even matter, since, given our inability compose simple declarative sentences, aliens from outer space will have long since overrun and enslaved us?

i'm not sure whether that would be a sea change or a disconnect.

Kurt "big daddy" True
1 july 2001