THE DYING ART OF ELOQUENCE

When he speaks,
The air, a chartered libertine, is still.

- William Shakespeare

I have often wondered about the attainment of such a powerful gift. Not so long ago I grew disgruntled with using simple words and decided to enter the arena of verbosity, with the idea that my literal growth should be evidenced by the extension of my vocabulary.

Central to the start of this period in my life was the influence of literature. The mesmeric speeches of Shakespeare like those present in Julius Caesar, words that meant a lot more than they do nowadays,

I am supposed to hail from a culture that is very capable in passing on messages orally; this in my opinion helps me appreciate really great oratory, with no particular sense of how to be a great orator myself. The proverbs have been replaced by easily discovered quotations online, my voice corrupted by the constant effort to speak English in an unaccustomed manner, and the beauty of words themselves have been lost by my constant quest to make things overtly simplistic or satisfy my childish desires for obfuscation, hence the neglect of words like cavalier, chivalry, courtship. Inevitably, with the loss of such words comes the disappearance of the pure meaning of such words, and it is descriptive of my generation that instead of maintaining these words, we are always searching for newer and more ambiguous words to replace them, just so we can stake a claim on our dynamic existence.

The difficulty with the current trend is that you can hardly say something that will not sound trite. LOVE has been so misused that you can barely manage to say it and convey its deepest meaning at the same time, as such it has been so mistrusted that you risk scaring people away by using it. Almost every statement now has an automatic response, that originality and excellent eloquence is viewed as a dying art, and not the norm.

Then again, how many people would appreciate the true beauty of the language? It always seems easier to say “sup”, than delighted to make your acquaintance. What does this say about me? Besides screaming, “Geek”, it may mean many other things.
I find myself wondering whether all this while my extensive vocabulary has just been used to mask my inability to communicate well. Maybe I am just making up for my lack in expressing myself in the current slang and my communication skills are at best inadequate