I love Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.

I was a fan of both the show and the main character, especially the latter’s fashion choices and fighting skills.

I even loved her first incarnation as a campy dilettante.

My affection is coloured these days, what with Kristy Swanson and Josh Whedon being lost to the dark side, but perfection in people is never a possibility. Some of us turn out to be quite vile – does that mean everything we touched is now also verboten?

One of the brilliances of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer was the flouting and ignoring of the rules of language by the writers. They did what they wanted and didn’t worry much about iconoclastic codes. There was verbing of nouns, nounifying of qualifiers, and an embracement of fragments as valid parts of speech.

Things I’d never considered.

hidebound – unwilling or unable to change because of tradition or convention

Merriam-Webster

The one true way

I’d been raised by a teacher of English, and for her, language very much has a “one true way.”

I knew better than to confuse “can I” with “may I” from early on.

My mother loved to read, and she passed the affection down. Our tastes differ – I like popular or “women’s” fiction, while she prefers murder mysteries. She also has an affection for English lit. It boggles the mind, but there it is. She’s one of those rare birds that has no problem with Shakespeare in the original OE; she was puzzled and not half-contemptuous of the high school version with the built-in Cliff Notes I brought home in grade ten.  

This is the problem with experts – they’re fierce defenders of the one true way, trapped by a paradigm they no longer think to question.

Thank god I’ve only competencies rather than expertise. It makes it easier for me to tilt at sacred cows.

I do love a malaphor.

malaphor – an informal term for a mixture of two aphorisms, idioms, or clichés such as
“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it”

Merriam-Webster

Experts and atrophy

A lack of expertise makes it easier to accept changes as well. The “one true way” hates change. Also, I studied politics and economics. Those fields are rooted in change. It’s their happy place.

The current tendency to drop articles and adverbs from communication has my mom particularly perturbed. She likens it to a collapse of society, which is an exaggeration on my part, but not much. She finds it egregious. She finds the changes to communication a frustrating mistake. She won’t accept that the cell phone changed much, including language.

All hail the emoji.

She’s made no real effort to adapt to these changes either, holding onto her “correct” line in the sand and growing frustrated as the world continues to evolve regardless of her disapproval. And my frequent point, initially introduced by my son, that English has never been static, and that we speak very different English from the speakers of one hundred, three hundred, or five hundred years ago, is ignored.

No one likes facts that counter our particular worldviews. We can get quite dogmatic about our talking points. “One true way” thinking also lends itself to dogmatism. So does age if you’re not careful.

Life makes not codgering a challenge.

codger – an elderly man, especially one considered old-fashioned, amusing, eccentric

Dictionary. com

Aging and flexibility

I’m being careful in my own life. If I can’t stay in the loop forever, then I hope to limit the drift to loop-adjacent. Farther away than that, and you start to lose perspective. Besides, I like dancing to new music best.

The increasing stolidity of parents has become more noticeable in the last decade-and-a-half, and I’ve noticed it with their friends as well. Their ruts are deep, and they no longer flex much when it comes to socio-cultural, political, and economic change.

They do manage criticism. Unlike previous generations, she said tongue-in-cheek, the boomers consider the youth of today (and their parents) wasteful and wrong-headed. Their generation did things right, and things were, by and large, better for all when my parents were young. The various calamities of the boomer generation – and they were plentiful and dire – are ignored in favour of rosy and self-forgiving glasses.

I’m starting to suspect they’re a factory addition offered up at retirement.

I don’t want them.

The complaining about the up-and-comers isn’t limited to boomers. I hear it from my generation as well.

Gen X nostalgia is popping up everywhere these days and I have to say, I think our memories are going. We weren’t nearly as feral as TikTokkers like to suggest. Nor was life as rosy. We do love our walks to school uphill both ways in the snow.

Like boomers, they have criticizing the current generation down pat.

They sound like grumpy curmudgeons.

They sound like our parents. I’m still excluding myself. Not all of Gen-X is crotchety yet, though we’re definitely on the way. Big chunks of eighties kids are evolving into the “old men who yell at clouds.” I refuse to include myself in their number. I’m hardcore hip.

old man yells at clouds – a way to make fun of people who get angry over things they can’t control, usually directed at people angry over frivolous and manufactured controversies, drawn from the television show, “The Simpsons”

Memes Feel

Evolution and change

The world isn’t a static thing. It never has been, not once, not since there were people. Not since before there were people. Change is the only constant here. We change over our lives. Our ideas change. Our beliefs change. The weather changes.

How we live our lives is changing dramatically these days.

We will evolve and adapt both individually and as groups, or we’ll perish.

Getting stuck in a moment is kind of perishing.

In my positive moments, I pretend that we’re improving – that we’re getting better as people and as a species over time.

Other times I look at the state of the world and wonder if we can. Are we really that different than the people of the Crusades? We’re more sophisticated for sure, but that doesn’t necessarily mean different.

Change is our constant, but too many people remain frightened of it. Quite the pickle, exacerbated by the fact that we’re our worst selves when we’re scared. We hang out in our lizard brains when we’re frightened, eschewing good things like smarts and empathy.

Getting mired in tradition and habit is never a good answer, but that’s a lesson we seem unable to grasp.

fundamentalism – an extreme adherence to the core rules of any set of beliefs. Often, this term is used in reference to religious fundamentalism, a militantly strict interpretation of a religious code.

Study. com

Fundamentalism and stagnation

We are here for a statistically insignificant amount of time, individually and as a group. Far more of history exists and will exist without us than with us.

How arrogant we are to imagine that the conclusions we’ve come to about the way to manage this, that, and the other thing are correct. How arrogant to suppose that human evolution across any metric should stop with a single generation, ostensibly because the way things are is so perfect no more change is required?

I read in a book somewhere, or maybe I say it on an episode of Family Ties, that everyone shifts to the centre and the right as they age. We age into conservatives or something like that. But conservatism is just stalled liberalism.

I was pretty determined to not stall. I could never understand the desire to keep things the same. It’s not how I roll. In some ways. I do like a personal routine.

The desire for stagnation is a common and old one – every society has its fundamentalists.

They’re usually what brings it down. We’ve seen this over and over again across history. Societies rise and societies fall. Greece. Rome. Spain. Mongols. Britain. I could list more. They all fall to the same fate. Sure, wars and invasions hurt some, but they lost them because they’d already been weakened from within. They’d become static, rigid, and proponents of the “one true way.”  

But it’s evolve or die for us. I don’t make the rules. I just report the results.

The slow learning is unfortunate.

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