Language

I find I am less willing to suffer fools than I was even a few years ago.  The last thing I saw as I left work last evening was a poorly written, fragmented, and incoherent e-mail from a software technician lambasting me for questioning the potential of a project he was working on.

Now if I had sent my concerns to him, or I had actually called into question his ability to write the routines that are suppose to make all the pieces work I think he may have had a reason to engage me in this issue.  But I didn’t, I wrote to the program manager, or the one who is supposed to function as the manager -- asking if we are going to continue spending money on a project that is ill defined and as a result unlikely to succeed.

This exchange, as minor as it was, got me to thinking.  We have become a nation of intolerant fools.  We form our opinions, build the walls of self-righteousness around them and hurl whatever weapons we have from the parapets.  We no longer talk and we no longer listen.  I wonder, as we lose our grasp on the fundamental English language structure and merge into some kind of hybrid of English, Electronic shorthand, "ghetto" and Spanish will we actually destroy one of the threads that has historically bound us as a nation?