I spent the last week working in Illinois (absolutely nothing resembling anything of value to be said or heard about anything having to do with that (bleep)hole state) and now I have to spend the week following Thanksgiving in Kansas (see above comment in parentheses.)
On a side note, I was actually looking at Twitter, trying to decide if it was worth selling my soul to be able to keep up with my favorite sports players on their Twitter accounts, and ran across a study that showed that 40% of all Twitter messages fall under the term "pointless babble." (That's their term, not mine, but I couldn't agree more.) This was the largest piece of the colorful pie chart they made for the non-statistically inclined. Pointless babble is linguistically referred to as "small talk" or, "commenting on what is perfectly obvious."
I'm really surprised it was as low as 40%.
From a linguistic point of view, small talk falls under ritualized communication, much like a dog barking because it heard another dog bark. Except I think it's a good chance that the dogs are displaying a better use of their mental faculties than most humans do in this case. The sad thing is, that in today's world, small talk is no longer pointless babble, it is babble that has taken on a very real point, that is, affirming one's own place in this world. Like scared children wandering through a hallway at night on their way to the bathroom who will sing to themselves as a form of self-assurance, human beings today feel the need to constantly flap their lower jaw and force air through their windpipes to prove that they exist, they are important, and they demand attention. No longer the image of the quietly self-assured, confident of his own existence. Now we have hairless gorillas, slapping their chests and pulling up grass to impress others.
Noam Chomsky wrote a few decades ago his theories on universal grammar. Taking the idea from a linguistic point of view, he showed how the parts of human psychology that are shared amongst all races show that the human mind will form, quite predictably, common ways to express thoughts or feelings common to all, and these modes are shared by all languages. Which is why even languages as radically different as English and Japanese have so many similarities in the thought processes which create the grammar, then vocabulary, of those languages. In every language I've ever heard of, a noun is a noun, which means that a thing is defined and it's existence taken for granted. A verb is a verb and describes action and therefore assumes that things undergo change in accordance with our common perception of time. Universal grammar. The implications are pretty far-reaching. Now, personally, I think Chomsky is an idiot who needs to be beaten with a stick every day for the rest of his life, but if this theory happens to be true (even a blind hog finds an acorn every now and then) what does that say about humanity if the most common, global-wide form of communication (which, remember, shows the areas of human psychology and mental-makeup that can be found in all of us) is pointless babble?
I am reminded of Douglas Adam's theory on why humans talk so much. His alien character, Ford Prefect, on observing humanity ultimately decided that if human's mouths stopped moving, their brains started working.
Needless to say, I did not sign up on Twitter.
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