It Ain't Shakespeare, but It Is the Way We Talk

by Pa Rock

Typing Fool

I am not a big fan of those automatic responses that Google insists on attaching to every email - choices which allow the truly lazy to click an "appropriate" reply.   And even though they often say exactly what I happen to be thinking, I still regard that whole system as insultingly impersonal - and I feel challenged to find an alternate "original" short reply of my own.

My youngest son, a resident of the "Great State of Kansas" and I were exchanging emails at the beginning of the week when the subject of the victory parade that Kansas City, of the Great State of Missouri, was planning on Tuesday to honor the returning world champion Kansas City Chiefs football team, came up.    Tim, who lives in a Kansas suburb of Kansas City, is a big Chiefs fan.

But Tim, like his old man, is not a fan of big, raucous crowds.

I thought Tim might make an exception for this once-in-a-lifetime event and wade through the yelling revelers to cheer on the victorious Chiefs.   He said that he really didn't want to go, but one of his in-laws did, so he might be tagging along.

Late the next evening I happened to email Tim about something else and asked at the end of my communication whether he had gone to the parade or not.  He sent back this response:

"No.  There were hundreds of thousands of people wearing red who showed up at 5AM and earlier.  There were bodies in the trees and traffic as far as the the eye could see.  We just couldn't bring ourselves to do it."

The Google quick-response algorithm had difficulty unpacking that one for meaning, but it managed to kick out a somewhat non-committal and vague list of:

"Wow.   That sucks.  Interesting."

And in the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, those three choices, taken together, captured the essence of my thoughts on the matter fairly well.

It ain't Shakespeare, but it is the way we speak, and the Google algorithm has mastered it.