I was ringing my patients for today’s theatre list yesterday, and I was struck by the generational differences in their apparent enthusiasm levels.
One young woman in her early twenties seemed quite excited by the prospect of talking to me. Our conversation was littered with “fantastic!” and “amazing!” to a level that was gratifying but also a bit baffling. There didn’t seem to be anything that we were discussing that warranted quite such a degree of fervour. On the other hand, the patient in her sixties who had good reason to want to discuss the plans for her upcoming surgery with the anaesthetist was luke warm in comparison. When I told her who I was, she simply said “oh – good.”
Is this effusive language a sign of genuine zeal? In which case – I’m flattered. On the other hand, I’ve had much the same kind of language from wait staff in their early 20s at the restaurant we go to for our regular date nights. And from the stories I’ve heard of the living nightmare that is hospo, it beggars belief that our servers could be so ecstatic about my choice of entree. Nice if so, but please excuse my disbelief. So, what’s going on? It’s possible my memory of the distant past is flawed, but I don’t remember saying “amazing!” about anything when I was that age. But when you consider the many reasons for existential despair in the world around us at this present juncture, I’m not going to begrudge today’s youth any minute spec of joy they can extract from their day.
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The Oxford University Press announced their word of the year this week, and it’s a word I’ve never even heard of. It’s “rizz”, supposedly a corruption of “charisma”. It was explained on the radio as the modern equivalent of “game” from the early 2000’s, which was no help at all to me. When I was in my teens at school, someone who was attractive and desirable of the opposite sex was described as “spunky”. I don’t think this would have made it on any word of the year lists, even if anyone had invented such a thing back then (the first Oxford Uni Press word of the year was “chav” back in 2004.) I don’t think I’d even tell any of my children about our use of the word “spunky”, for fear of (justified) ridicule. It’s enough of a struggle maintaining any semblance of dignity in front of them as it is. If I could have hidden any of those old high school photos from them, I would have. Although I guess it probably made them feel better about their own adolescent travails. The sacrifices we make!
