I was reading one of my grandmother's books recently.
She was a remarkable woman for her time - educated, accomplished, and a published author.
The television was on in the background, carrying coverage of a march supporting gay rights.
A few paragraphs later, my grandmother
described a character as feeling "gay and light-hearted."
The sentence stopped me.
And then I giggled.
Not because there was anything funny about what she had written.
There wasn't.
In her world, the sentence meant exactly what she intended it to mean.
The character was joyful.
Happy.
Carefree.
Not heterosexual.
And I couldn't stop imagining what would happen
if that sentence suddenly inherited today's meaning of the word.
The passage would change.
The character would change.
The story would change.
The poor woman wouldn't know what had happened to her own sentence.
My grandmother was writing in the 1930s.
She thought she knew the English language.
And she did.
By the standards of her day.
In her world, a mouse lived in a hole.
A cloud floated across the sky.
A web belonged to a spider.
A stream contained water.
Simple.
Today, I use a mouse to navigate the web,
access files stored in a cloud,
and stream movies.
If I had said that sentence to my grandmother,
she would probably have touched my forehead.
She might have wondered whether I had caught a virus.
And she would almost certainly have sent me to see Dr. Rao.
Which would have been perfectly reasonable in her day.
Back then, if you caught a virus, you went to the doctor.
I would pay five dollars.
Dr. Rao would prescribe tablets.
Sometimes white.
Sometimes pink.
Sometimes bright yellow.
Sometimes capsules with mysterious powder hidden inside.
I swallowed the tablets.
The medicine entered my system.
The virus left my system.
Simple.
Today, if there is a virus, Dr. Rao is of very little help.
Now I have to see Dr. Norton.
Or Dr. McAfee.
I pay a hundred dollars.
I never see the medicine.
I never swallow the medicine.
The medicine is installed remotely.
Into my tablet.
Not me.
The tablet.
The tablet has the virus.
The tablet receives the medicine.
The medicine enters the tablet's system.
The virus leaves the tablet's system.
Poor thing. She would have been very confused.
I continued scrolling through my book on the tablet.
Wait. What?
Scrolling?
Through a book?
On a tablet?
Moses!
Are you listening?
Has everybody just gone crazy?
Melvin has a saying.
"The British gave us the English language and the Americans perfected it."
I usually tell him the Americans massacred it.
Water has a perfectly good T in it.
It's not Wader.
Water.
What's wrong with that?
But then I remember that I scroll through books on a tablet.
Store photographs in a cloud.
Use a mouse to navigate the web.
Stream movies.
And worry about viruses that infect electronics instead of people.
My head hurts!
Suddenly, it almost makes the Americans look innocent.