Friday, October 26, 2012

Learning to speak Entish

There is a scene in Lord of the Rings where Merry and Pippin, having been rescued from the uruks, are left in the care of the tree-giants known as Ents. What has stuck with me from this scene is a quote the Ent Treebeard says:

"You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say."

If you watch the movies, you know exactly what this means, but for explanation's sake, here's another quote (also because I like it *grin*):


Merry: It's (the Ent meeting) been going for hours.
Pippin: They must have decided something by now.
Treebeard: Decided? No, we have just finished saying "Good Morning".
Merry: But it's night time already! You can't take forever!
Treebeard: Now, don't be hasty, master Merriadoc.

This has stuck with me for a number of reasons. First, it's an amusing commentary on the differences between the generations in our society. But also because of the interesting commentary, well, I guess it's still a generational difference.

When my family lived in Suffolk, VA, we went to a house called "Riddick's Folly" that was full of historical artifacts from the Civil War. Among them are letters written from soldiers to their loved ones. One of them includes an apology near the end for his letter being so short; a measly 5 pages long. Now I don't know about you, but  I can't remember the last time I hand-wrote something 5 pages long.

Few people in my generation have had to do that, but my issue is less about the writing. My generation has almost entirely lost the ability to converse. If a conversation gets more than five minutes long, we get a lot of awkward silences. We just don't understand how to do it. It's an art that has been lost to us, and I think I have pinned a culprit.

Television.

When you think about it, it makes sense. TV shows have a limited amount of time to convey their plot for the episode, and thus they cannot spend prolonged time in conversation. But an unintended side effect of this is that our generation, which is statistically more media-saturated than previous generations, has learned that all valuable conversation can happen within five minutes or less. We now have a developed stigma against prolonged conversation. It's not that we couldn't do it, or that we don't want to. It's that we have been trained not to by our media conventions.

There's not a lot we can do about it. In fact about all you can do is make a conscious effort to invest in solid conversation. And this is where the 'generational' thing comes back into the picture. A great place to start training yourself to converse is with people from our parents' or grandparents' generations. The art of conversation hasn't left them like it has us.

Speak with them, and learn to converse more deeply.

Learn how to say things that are "worth taking a long time to say".

Learn to speak Entish :)