I am resolved to the idea that I am not exactly au courant. If I look at, say, the red carpet at a major cultural event, I can identify virtually none of the celebrities. It's not that I don't recognize A-listers anymore, but that even their names don't come close to ringing a bell. I do not find this particularly bothersome. I still know a lot of other stuff. It's not that I'm losing my mind to the ravages of age, but that my mind does not travel the realms of, say, contemporary pop singers, influencers, sports stars other than golfers (who are seldom on red carpets), etc. These are generational issues. I'll stick to my times, you are more than welcome to yours.
It turns out, sadly, that there seem to be similar generational eras of language. I wanted to make a point about a debate issue this weekend at Pennsbury, so I turned to my young colleague and said that we needed to talk turkey.* She looked at me with that glazed expression that says to one and all, what do turkeys have to do with it? Later some minor issue arose, which I referred to as small potatoes. I would have thought that this one was common enough, but aside from her wondering if I planned to catalogue an entire Thanksgiving dinner, I did not get much of a response from her. When later I remarked, when I knew she had heard me perfectly well, that I don't chew my cabbage twice, we decided to call it quits on the idea that we were speaking a shared language. Later Kaz reported to me that someone she had been speaking to gave her that glazed expression when she used the word milquetoast. Given that the program I am writing this in accepts the word milquetoast without offering any absurd alternatives, I am left with no absurd alternative myself but to offer that theoretical glazed expression in return now.
We are not talking about slang here. Slang comprises words that come and go with the speed of how long it takes from its invention by young people to its utterance by old people, at which point young people are no longer using it. We are not talking neologisms versus paleogisms (ironically, a neologism). We are talking about idioms, figures of speech if you will, or maybe tropes. The expression "talking turkey" can be traced back to the 1840s. We are talking the aspects of language that make it different from mathematics. And we are talking well-educated people here, teachers entrusted with the minds of impressionable adolescents. And these teachers simply do not understand English as she is spoken anymore.
We are doomed.
Debate: When my colleague and I were, I had hoped, about to talk turkey about debate, I referred her to the very long essay I had recently written that was, ultimately, a defense of parent judging. Immediately upon seeing the article on the screen she gasped a TL;DR** and scrolled down to the comments. There she read from some yabbo that I should be talking more about debate as I used to do in this blog and less about all this other crap. Since I almost never read the comments, I would have otherwise missed this insightful response to what I'm doing here. The thing is, as I no longer coach, I don't theoretically have any skin in the game. But I am what you might call a debate entrepreneur, or maybe a debate proselytizer, and even though I am no long working with debate students, I am still working with debate in general. I am very much a part of the debate ethos, so to speak. So, my fine feathered yabbo, I agree with you, and I will, going forward, get back to talking more about debate per se.
* When I was in trade publishing, I had an author who spoke a brand of English that some say arose from the suburbs of Philadelphia. Maybe the Jersey Shore was more like it. He once brought a serious issue to me, saying that we needed to sit down and discuss turkey. Language, obviously, both evolves and devolves.
** If this article had a halfway decent copyeditor, they would have flagged this and commented that you can't gasp a TL;DR.
