ArcaMax

"How many people said the word 'cigarettes' today?" I asked my wife, Deborah.

"Or 'book of matches,'" she said.

We were trying to figure out how America ended up with a net loss in words spoken.

A serious magazine called "Perspectives on Psychological Science" says we speak 28% fewer words every day. According to these folks, in 2005, we spoke 16,600 words a day. That was down to less than 12,000 per day in 2019.

Where did the words go?

"We should have picked up extra words just ordering coffee," I said. "You order an iced coffee with almond milk and one sweetener. I order hot, black, no sugar. Your order is seven words. Mine is four."

"I order on the app," she said. "All seven spoken words are gone. Poof!"

I work at home. My wife goes out to work four days a week and works from home on Thursdays. We communicate by text. If I called her, and she saw my number come up, she'd think I was dying, or one of the cats was dying, or the house was on fire.

We live in the least literate time of our century, but we write all the time.

"Went out to breakfast," I text my wife. "Roger's. Ham and eggs."

"Yummy," she answers.

Love poetry, right?

I've written "I love you" in a text. It feels stupid and the words lay next to each other like dead fishes.

The days Deborah works at home, she communicates with the three other people in her office solely by text. So many spoken words lost!

I communicate with the person who edits this column solely via email. I've never heard her voice. Is she AI? Maybe I'm AI. No one can be sure anymore, and it may not make a difference.

We're all becoming the strong, silent type, or at least the silent type.

We splash our weakness and our anger and our lust across screens. Face-to-face, we have nothing to say. Just tell the app what kind of coffee you want, tell the drone which city to attack.

This is one of the reasons why the standard of public speaking is so low today, and that crosses party lines. The ability to hold a group of people still with just your voice and the roll or snap of your words is vanishing. The speaking candidate or incumbent can yawp out almost any kind of insane, nonrhythmic verbal slop and still be at least halfway listened to by his listeners, half of whom are using their phones to take a picture of themselves at the event.

Although I've been a professional writer for more than 46 years, I've always loved the spoken word. It's why I like diners and bars where, for free, you can sit on a stool and listen to people tell the small stories of their lives and days to other people. Every conversation is the chapter of a novel spoken out loud.

And I sit in silence so often in those places now, with nothing to overhear, and to begin a conversation with a stranger is an invasion, a possible symptom of mental instability, or at least, the first indication that you're unacceptably high.

I love writing on a computer because it's so easy to delete, to edit, to move whole paragraphs. I've accepted that and Spotify and Kindle, and Amazon Prime and ordering my pipe tobacco online.

I'm a silent man in a country where the words are stuck in our throats, and the cursor blinks, waiting for us to not speak.

Someday, maybe no one will have heard that little shake in someone's voice the first time they tell you they love you.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's lates book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.