“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, and don′t criticize what you can’t understand. Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command; your old road is rapidly aging. Please get out of the new one if you can′t lend your hand.” From The Times, They Are a-Changin’, written by Bob Dylan.

In case you’re studying for your English exam…

Despite Dylan’s best efforts two-thirds of a century ago, the times they always have been changing. Some of us feel a little queasy about the exponential speed that makes these changes seem mandatory; the young’uns catch on faster because they have fewer cobwebs in their brainpan.

For example, it seems a lot of older folks — say, above thirty-five — are clutching their pearls while bemoaning the death of cursive writing. I was one of them, but only briefly. Ever since we beat Germany at world warfare, the art of cursive died a protracted death. But by the time Baby Boomers started pumping out the next round of rugcrawlers, even they — we — couldn’t read each other’s cursive. Now with all these tubes and wires in everybody’s pocket, we don’t even need know how to type. Just speak up and your smartphone will take your dictation, wreck your spelling by turning misspelled words into brand new words that are wrong, change words at random and complete your thoughts by converting your prose into Aramaic.

The often-heard response is “But they can’t even write their names! How will they get along?” Give those pearls a rest, Methuselah. They been getting along just fine with fingerprint IDs, camera IDs, passwords, USB keys, retina scans (if you’re planning on being cast in a spy movie) and all kinds of “security” systems that are proliferating like amoebas at a binary fission orgy. Cursive is becoming the 21st century buggy whip.

We are surviving the loss of cursive writing just fine, thank you. The next time somebody writes a Declaration of Independence, don’t sweat their penmanship. It will be written on a laptop or tablet, and it will be signed electronically.

But if you still feel the need to piss off the wise old dynasties, no problem. Each generation mines new words that, at least initially, confuse, frustrate and annoy the ancient ones.

Presently, we are burdened with the adjective “iconic.” Everything is iconic. Stuff that wasn’t around last year is now iconic.

The word is now meaningless. If just about everything is iconic, then nothing is iconic. This is similar to the word “unique.” Something is either unique or it is not. One thing cannot be uniquer than another. and, of course, icons have a shelf life.

I gave up at being annoyed by the phrase “more importantly.” It is here to stay and there’s nothing I can do about that but flinch and get steamed. But, for the record, “importantly” was in no way a real world. The term “truthiness” does not seem to be in use all that much — Stephen Colbert doesn’t say it, and he coined it years ago. However, it made the New Oxford American dictionary quickly after it was first broadcast and, therefore, it possesses a linguistic birth certificate. In fact, “importantly” also made the New Oxford, so I really should hock those pearls of mine.

In fact, I should let go of a lot of this shit. Language is a living thing. It grows, it fades, it evolves. It represents our times, and it represents the vox populi. People who are committed to being old are wallowing in their past. If a sufficient number of people eschew the new verbiage, it will fade away, recategorized as a fad.

You know. Like the term “vox populi.”