In the home where I grew up there was a marvellous old gramophone and a hundred or more cylinders with recorded music.  The gramophone consisted of a well crafted wooden case with a crank on the side that provided the power to turn a spindle under the lid.  To play, I would first wind it up, then put one of the cylinders on the spindle, turn on the switch and set the head with the needle at the beginning of the grooves on the cylinder.  That was it, no electricity or batteries needed.  After playing a few recorded cylinders, the music would start to slow down and I had to wind it up again.

I think the gramophone must have originally belonged to my grandparents.  The music was all from an earlier era, but somehow it was more interesting to play music on this old machine than to play modern 78’s on my modern record player.  One of my favourite cylinders wasn’t music at all.  It was entitled “Uncle Josh buys an automobile” and told the story of how Uncle Josh had finally decided to buy one of these newfangled contraptions called an automobile.  He got the motor started and the automobile started to move, but Uncle Josh didn’t know how to control it without reins and it didn’t respond to Gee or Haw or Whoa.  The automobile left the road, went through the ditch, then a fence and finally came to rest in a pasture.  I haven’t heard it for 50 years and it was a lot funnier than I can tell it.

I wonder how many of my readers even remember 78 rpm records?  The recording industry progressed from those cylinders to 78 rpm, 45 rpm and 33 rpm LP records, then to tape and CD’s and then to mp3.

In the meantime, the written language seems to have regressed back to an era just after the phonetic alphabet first came into use and before the invention of the dictionary.  Even newspapers often use a word that sounds something like the word they want to use, but means something entirely different.  They appear to believe that real human proofreaders are no longer needed now that they have spell check software, except that spell check software empowers the confusion I just described.

Then there is texting.  In my mind, texting is just as tinny sounding as that old Edison gramophone.  I emailed a business recently to enquire about one of their products.  The business emailed back in text language.  Do I really want to do business with someone who can’t write real words in complete sentences?

A young acquaintance told of trying to help her nine-year-old niece with an essay for school.  She discovered that her niece did not have a clue about spelling.  She apparently had never seen you and are spelled in their normal English form.  All she knew was u r.

This raises a whole bunch of worrying questions.  Why does a nine-year-old girl have her own cell phone in the first place?  What were her parents thinking when they bought her that phone?  What are they actually teaching in schools these days?  Is there any hope for this generation of children?

I guess there have always been old fogeys like me worrying what the younger generation is coming to.  My parents did, too.  I realized later that I could have learned some useful things a lot sooner if I had listened to my parents.  But they were just too old-fashioned.