I understand some students are still puffing their assigned wordcounts with "The dictionary definition of...." and God help us all, "According to Wikipedia....", but I've seen this tactic in dozens of online feature stories now:
To give you a sense of their lot, when you search “are millennials” in
Google, the search options that come up include: “are millennials
selfish,” “are millennials lazy,” and “are millennials narcissistic.”
Want the zeitgeist? Just type it into Google! ....I got nothin', folks, not even sarcasm.
This was more poignant:
Once there were letters: handwritten, typewritten, carefully crafted,
dashed off, profound or mundane, tinged with expectancy. Correspondence
required waiting. “I need you more and more, and the great world grows
wider, and dear ones fewer and fewer, every day that you stay away,”
Emily Dickinson wrote to her future sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert, in
1852. Were they alive today, would Dickinson and Gilbert merely G-chat?
Simon Garfield might think so. His latest book, “To the Letter,” is a
nostalgic and fretful look at the “lost art” of letter writing. “A world
without letters would surely be a world without oxygen,” he declares,
noting that his book confronts this possibility. It’s tempting to laugh
nervously and say, “Why so ominous?” But then again, OMG, maybe he’s got
a point. A certain artfulness has surely been lost as emoticons and
Snapchats take over as modes of expression.
descensus Averno facilis est