The way we express ourselves has drastically changed throughout the years! In the 60’s it was “hep” to be “ cool man”! The seventies we said phrases like….”right on” or “ you got to be kidding”. The 80’s saw ““rock on”! Today if I hear “ absolutely” or “ no worries” one more time, I will scream!
It drives me crazy when I read a newspaper or magazine article with words like “gotta” instead of “ have got to”. I usually figure the writer was under 30 years old. I remember writing University essays in the 1980’s in longhand on lined paper and after the fourth spelling error the professor would not continue reading it! Today they have programmes at Universities that will detect plagiarism!

The “Emoji” ( don’t ask me why they are called that) has replaced things like “Thank you “ or “ have a nice day”. I am sure you could write an entire conversation using only “emojis “. They have proved that if you leave all the vowels out of a written essay, you would still be able to read and understand it. Asemic writing has become popular in art. It is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means “ having no specific semantic content “ or “without the smallest unit of “meaning”.

samples of Asemic writing

There is a very interesting tombstone just outside of Wellesley, Ontario at Rush’s Cemetery. It’s known as “The Most Curious Tombstone in Canada”. Dr. Samuel Bean had well been known for being a cruciverbalist, a crossword enthusiast. He had enjoyed working all sorts of puzzles as well as creating them for others. No one is quite sure, however, why Dr. Samuel Bean had been motivated to create this unique epitaph for his departed wives.

Dr. Samuel Bean had wanted to honour his first two wives, Henrietta and Susanna in 1866 with a puzzling epitaph. This fifteen by fifteen array of letters and numbers hadn’t been solved for decades following Dr. Bean’s untimely death in 1904. Dr. Samuel Bean had perished before sharing his mysterious coded solution. Why had he created a puzzle on their tombstone? Why had it been a secret he hadn’t shared? Who had finally solved it? If you look up his story you can find out who solved it and what it said! Makes for good rainy day read! My gift to you!