Ready for a rant today...here ya go, then?
In the recent season premiere of the show "Necessary Roughness," therapist Dr. Dani is in her kitchen at 2 in the morning talking to the fish in a blender that her daughter brought home from a visit to her father's house. Dani is baking biscotti and talking to herself, essentially, but it helps her to direct her thoughts to an outside entity. When caught by her daughter and son, she asks,"Which sounds worse, that I was talking myself or to the fish?"
I'm going to confess. I talk to myself. Sometimes it just helps to get the words out there. Sometimes I do it in the car while I'm driving. Sometimes I do it as a prayer to God. Sometimes I have "conversations" with my cats. In the case of my cats, they tend to talk back to me.
Wait! Wait! I am not the crazy cat lady, I swear! I don't mean they SPEAK ENGLISH to me or anything. Actually, they speak Spanish. No...No! I am joking, of course. I just mean they respond. We've taken great care to talk to our cats to encourage them to vocalize back to us when they want something...or when they are caught behind the hamper in the closet and can't get out. Believe me, it comes in handy then.
The point is...language is important. Sometimes, it just helps to hear the words out there. Like trying to remember how to pronounce a word. You say it out loud and go "does that sound RIGHT?" Sometimes words that need to be said need to be practiced before you say them to someone's face...or through the phone. I have no proof of this myself, but I believe that language is an essential human instinct. We desperately need to communicate. Verbal language developed as a means to do that. I imagine the "cave men" making singing noises in praise of their deity at this point in the discussion, because it feels really good to make noise sometimes. Look at Tom Hanks in "Castaway", for instance. Desperate for companionship and communication, he develops "Wilson" out of a volleyball so he has someone to talk to!
I wonder what the internet is going to do to language, actually. I've SEEN what it's done to written language. "LOL OMG wut's u up 2? " *shudders * To be fair, I don't know what people's language skills were like before this, so that may be an improvement. I heard there is talk of discontinuing cursive writing lessons in schools now. I go on record as believing that to be a bad move. I remember being a young child and I couldn't WAIT to learn this secret language of CURSIVE WRITING. (insert Dum Dum Da music here). I scribbled everywhere pretending to write it. I can't imagine taking cursive writing out of the world. They'll have to give special medical school classes to doctors so they can learn to use it to write prescriptions, I guess. How can we ever sign our ineligible signatures without it!?
Hm...I know I started with a point. What was it again?
Oh, yeah, I remember. Talking to Fish...and cats...and inanimate objects...
Just remember, if you don't learn to be comfortable with it now...you'll never be able to be okay talking to apparently thin air when you go travelling back in time and Al comes to you as a hologram... Or when you move into a house and find you're rooming with a ghost that only you can see because you've been turned into a werewolf....
Just sayin'...
