The use of “dear” has all but disappeared. Emails start with a “Hi” or just a name and get right to the point. In and of itself, I could live with that, yet far more than that has disappeared.

We used to have conductors on buses who punched a hole in your paper ticket. They disappeared. Conductors knew exactly where you could get off, and if you had dropped your ticket by mistake, he would shrug his shoulders or ask you to pay again, not send you a fine by registered mail.

Norman and I used to go to Monkland Theatre on Sunday morning and buy tickets for two movies for the price of one. That involved standing outside in a line in the cold. I didn’t mind that at all; it was a time to chat and joke around. It was much more enjoyable than reading about a movie online on a small phone screen, and then buying a ticket that arrived as an SMS. Sometimes the ticket vendor spoke French, which was a chance for two Anglos to use the French that was drilled into our dumb skulls daily, year after year.

But let’s return to the “dear” issue. Language had several forms — how we spoke and how we wrote. The written language demanded respect. Dotting i’s and crossing t’s and proper spelling. It is not easy to spell in English, and that demanded real discipline. Whatever happened to discipline toward a language? Today, spell checkers and AI polish up our language the way chemicals can make a rotten apple look red — even though it’s still rotten underneath.

And yes, the way we use language now is rotten. Not because language shouldn’t change — it always has — but because we don’t respect it the way we used to. And that lack of respect doesn’t stay contained to grammar. It bleeds into truth itself. When people stop noticing how something is said — stop catching the dodge, the vague verb, the sentence built to mean nothing — they lose the instinct that once caught a lie in the act.

A generation trained to skim past sloppy language is also, without realizing it, trained to skim past dishonesty. The glib have always existed; what’s new is how little resistance they meet. Respect for language was never just about grammar — it was a kind of vigilance. Losing one, we are quietly losing the other.

My neighbours were Auntie and Uncle. Uncle Lou, Auntie Mona, Uncle Sonny, Auntie Rose, Uncle Rupert, Auntie Selma. I remember Uncle Sonny telling me, “Jesus, you are growing like a weed.”

Of course, I know I sound old. But I am young at heart and still in pretty good shape for an old fart. And I keep, cherish, and hold onto many things as they used to be. I have five fountain pens, I do not use my phone to buy railway tickets, I send real greeting cards by mail, and I often chat with vendors, waiters, and waitresses, and never, ever use my phone when speaking to people.
Thank you, dear readers, who have had the patience to get this far.