recalcitrancy

I'm not sure if that title's actually a word, but it's one I've transmutransferated from the word "recalcitrant". I can do that, because I fancy myself a poet and it is the work of poets to violate normalcy in language. Did you know that when Eisenhower (or Roosevelt, or whomever) said, "what we need is a return to normalcy" after the end of WWII, he was fabricating a new word. Yeppers, folks, that staple of the English language was invented on accident by a man who didn't know any better. Or perhaps he did - he was, after all, a bit of a warring chap. Maybe he was just being obstreporous.

The reason why I'm going off on all this is that the other day I was thinking about the effect globalization is having on language. Spanish, I know, has thousands and thousands of spanishized words, and vice-versa maybe (but probably not, because of manifest destiny and the God-given right of McDonalds to overrun the entire world). I just wonder if we haven't blown or polluted or sinned ourselves to oblivion at the end of two hundred years is we'll have one, mangled, culturally indistinct language. If that's they case will they, in some sort of Orwellian/Homogenization nightmare begin to pare down language so that everyone can understand until the average Joe (or Jane) will be unable to comprehend even the slightest bit of dialog in, say, Seinfeld re-runs?

These are the sorts of things I think about to give myself a break from what I'm doing, which is supervising/foremanning in a 24-person treeplanting camp in Quesnel, BC. The reason I vacate the premises in my mind is that, although I believe it is important to exist in the here and now, my here and now can be utterly-all-consuming if I let it. I don't get to vent with any sort of creative thingy for pretty much the entire summer, so instead I dance around in the Josh land of my cranial self.

That's all for now, I suppose. It's hard to get to a computer on days off and even harder to drag myself back into my creative mind-set. My computer guru-man Jon has turned on my meter, though, so I can now see that lots and lots of people actually look at this thing. Now that I know I'm not just throwing watermelon seeds into the darkness, I'll make a more concerted effort to keep on yammering. Perhaps Jon will figure a way to let me post some pictures in here, too. Yummy.