Greetings, writers—
This newsletter comes to you—if it comes to you, that is, since cell service is spotty and wifi non-existent—from a state park on Orcas Island in the San Juans. I’m sitting in a camp chair in a meadow, listening to twelve friends of mine play Book Balderdash.1 Nerds!
Just kidding. The morning is cool and a little cloudy, but it’s supposed to get warm and sunny later. The barn swallows and violet green swallows2 that nest in the eaves of the lodge fill the air with a constant high-pitched cheeping. Further down the meadow, a deer grazes, and past the deer, through a small patch of woods and down a gravel path, there’s a big lake ringed by trees that some of us jump into every morning before breakfast.
I thought I’d written about this place before, but maybe I haven’t; to make a long story short, 85 people from Portland, Seattle, and LA convene every year to make an informal but impressively organized summer camp. It’s pretty much my favorite week of the year, and in my fantasy world, a novel comes of out this experience (it’s our eighth year of it), but that book would have come after the one I’m currently “writing” (quotes because not a lot of writing is happening at the moment), so who knows.
But this post is not actually about camp; it’s about language, and how things that have meaning to one generation make no sense to another. Yesterday, when I was talking to a couple members of Gen Z outside the lodge, I happened to use the expression “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Their eyes went wide. They had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
They’d also never heard that a stitch in time saves nine, or a rolling stone gathers no moss. I know, I know, sayings like these were old fifty years ago, but I didn’t think they’d fall out of our common language so completely.
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