“I knocked it out of the park.”
“You’re killing it.”
“I owned it.”
“She slayed it.”
“Knock ‘em dead.”
“They went in there, guns blazing.”
“Battleground state.”
“Target audience.”
“Hunting down terrorists.”
“Take a shot at it.”
“Armed with the facts.”
If you’re interested, click here for a longer list.
Speaking in an American context (not all that different from the Canadian one), Ocean Vuong points out how, despite how technologically advanced our culture is, we are still primitive in how we use language.
Technology doesn’t regress. We will never again live in a world of Model T Fords and rotary dial telephones. The day after Steve Jobs died, the iPhone continued to innovate.
We fall into the capitalist myth that human knowledge, wisdom, ethics and morals grow exponentially, like technology. But they can’t, if for no other reason than the fact that we die. Every generation has to, to some degree, start over and figure it out for themselves.
What is it about a culture that can largely value itself through a lexicon of death?
What happens to our imagination when we can only celebrate ourselves through our very vanishing?
What if we were to invest in our moral and linguistic advances the way we invest in technological advances?
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