The recent battle between Apple and the US Department of Justice over an encrypted iPhone was rendered moot when the DOJ figured out how to get into the device without the company’s help. Apple’s argument in favor of privacy would appeal to me more if I could find a shred of evidence that privacy has not already become a faint, nostalgic glimmer of the past, in the sort of story that old people begin with the phrase “in my day.”
I say this as a frequent customer of the New York City Transit Authority. Consider this incident. Setting: a crowded M15 bus. Characters: Young Mother (YM) with a toddler and an infant, seated in the back. Young Guy (YG) with friends, standing near the front. The dialogue goes like this:
YG: Hey! I haven’t seen you in ages!
YM: I got fired!
YG: You got fired?
YM: Totally.
Keep in mind that this conversation spanned the length of a double bus — the kind of vehicle that bends in the middle to make turns easier. So in effect, the participants were half a block apart. It’s not that getting fired is necessarily — or ever — something to hide. In my day, though, we gave out this information privately, not as a public service announcement. (See what I mean about “in my day”?)
But this isn’t a post about privacy, primarily. Instead it’s about the word “totally.” If YM was “totally fired,” does that mean someone can be “partially fired,” as in “you have to work on Mondays and Wednesdays. You are fired on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays”? Somehow that scenario doesn’t seem to fit the definition of “fired.” Instead, “totally” in this context seems to mean “really,” a way to indicate that you meant what you just said. That such an affirmation is necessary is a sad commentary on the status of truth nowadays. (“Nowadays,” but the way, is another favorite word in senior circles.)
My advice: Hit the mute button in your own mouth a little more often, especially in mass transit situations. Then the privacy issue won’t be moot. Not totally, anyway.
I agree but not totally, the exception being that, in my experience of teaching first-year college comp to students educated in the Los Angeles Universal School District, young people use “nowadays” as often as we, although sometimes they prefer the alternative spelling, “now a days.” My favorite student essay, though, is the one that begins, “Back in ancient times, 1910. . . .” Based on this skewed timeline, I suppose you’d have to place “our day” as the Middle Ages.
Ancient in 1910 — now I feel even older!
It’s good to see you incorporating some of today’s expressions into your English. As a senior citizen I am pleased if I can’t quiet my budding protests about language change because senior or not, I am only human. No matter how little I may dislike what I hear people say, I can never forget that my beloved Spanish and the other Romance languages stem from vulgar Latin.
As for privacy, the Spanish culture wrote the strictest rule-book on it. In that sense the conversation that you heard, and the way you heard it, belongs to the world of people without social graces.
Ah, just a smidgeon of “valley-speak” that made its way east, I’m thinking! We hear it up here all the time, too. Annoying, but I suppose in another year or so, something else will be in vogue. After all, who still says, for instance: “I can’t wait for the exam to start. NOT!”