How the English Language Met Its Demise

In a world where computers held most of the world's information, a global power outage was a catastrophe. Candles, books, paper, and pencils were frantically dug out of attic boxes. I could see dust billowing out of every window as people looked for things with which to record everything they remembered from online documents.

My fellow students at Duke University were just about on the verge of group suicide as they realized their twenty-page term papers had been lost. I, being a typical procrastinator, had not yet begun my paper for my class on the Synoptic Gospels, so I luckily did not lose anything important. To my dismay, though, the paper would still be due on a modified due date. My professor, in order to help us, reopened a musty storage room full of theology textbooks as old as my parents. I was the first to see them.

"Books!" I gasped. I had not seen a book since very early childhood.

"I have always suspected technology would fail us, so I kept our old textbooks just in case," Professor Metzger explained as he handed me Social-Science Commentary of the Synoptic Gospels.

I attempted to open it, but the cover would not budge. I pried and pried at it for a few minutes before I finally gave it back to him.

"It's broken."

He flipped it open with what I perceived as skillful hands. My eyes widened at his magic trick.

"You don't open it from the binding," he said, rolling his eyes.

I touched the title page. "How does it work again?" I asked. "I forgot." Professor Metzger demonstrated how to use it by flipping through the pages with his fingers. He then handed it back to me.

"Take it. I'll give them out to the other students, too, and move the deadline of the paper. Chao."

He waved and left me standing in the storage room. After practicing turning the pages, I felt ready to start my paper. I whipped out a notebook and pencil from my bag, opened the textbook, and started writing. Soon, however, I realized I needed more sources. There were even more books on the subject I was writing about and a bunch of Bibles of various translations (essential for a theological paper). With more tools, I began to form a thesis statement in my head. It would start out like, The phenomenon known as the "Messianic Secret" in the Gospel of Mark is best explained by . . . or something like that. But I did not actually know what the word phenomenon meant; it just sounded good in the sentence. Since I feared getting docked points for using a word incorrectly, I tried to think of where I could go to find the word's definition. Maybe there was a book somewhere in the storage room.

As I searched, I came across a locked metal cabinet. I tried chewing the lock until it broke, but the only thing I achieved was making my teeth hurt. Desperate to know if the word I wanted to use would be appropriate in the context, I ran outside to my car and then drove to my friend's apartment building. I did not even bother to knock before bursting through his door.

"David! I need your shotgun!" I exclaimed. Surprised, he jerked awake and rolled out of his comfy chair. I received a death glare.

"Haven't I told you before that I'm cranky when my nap is interrupted?" David growled.

"Sorry, man, but I really need your shotgun. There's this lock I need to blow off a cabinet because I'm looking for a book of word definitions."

He scratched his head and returned to his seat. "Why don't you just use the internet?" he suggested.

"Where have you been? We're in the middle of worldwide power outage!"

This was all news to David.

"Well, I've been sleeping most of the time since that party on Saturday," he said, smiling sheepishly. "Sleepin' off the hangover, you know?"

I groaned and went to his cluttered kitchen. I would just get the gun myself.

"Our term paper's new deadline is in two weeks, and I've barely started researching," I continued, pulling the gun down from atop his refrigerator. A box of cereal tumbled down. "There are a bunch of old textbooks on biblical studies we can use. What I need right now, though, is a book of definitions of words so my paper won't suck!"

"Books? Wow. I haven't seen one of those since, like, preschool. I've got to see this."

David went to his room to get a shirt to wear and then followed me out the door. When we arrived at the storage room and opened the door, David gawked at the ancient wonders inside.

"No time to be amazed," I said, pulling him into the room with me. "We need to get into the cabinet. I bet there's something useful."

The two of us stumbled over the piles of books and reached the rusty treasure chest of secrets. I angled the gun and aimed at the lock. BOOM! Miss. I tried again. BOOM! It seemed all I could do was make holes in the door. I aimed for one more try.

"Jeremy, gimme that," David said with an exasperated sigh. He snatched the gun from my hands and proceeded to whack the lock with the barrel. CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! With all the gunshots and banging, it was little wonder that Professor Metzger came rushing in. He probably thought someone was being murdered.

"What is going on in here?" he shouted over the banging. David and I stopped what we were doing and turned around. Property damage was a big no-no.

"We need to get into this locked cabinet," I told him. "There might be something useful in it."

Professor Metzger pulled a key from his pocket.

"Oh!"

He ignored our unified exclamation of enlightenment and stuck the key in the dented lock. The lock fell apart in his hand.

"Well, that's one way to open a lock," he grumbled, opening the doors.

Perplexed, I leaned in and grabbed the single book inside. I lifted it up to the light until its glossy cover was illuminated.

Webster's Dictionary.

"Whoa! It's like Dictionary.com in book form!" David enthused.

"I bought it new about forty years ago," the professor explained. 2060? That was a long time ago. "Dictionaries were pretty unwanted books. Everyone already had a copy on their shelves that was at least half a century old, so no one was buying 'em. I only bought it because I was moved by the inevitable end of an era—the era of paper books. Taking in an unwanted book felt moral. Two weeks after I made the purchase, the government declared dictionaries unnecessary because everyone owned a computer and could get definitions online. All dictionaries were taken out of stores and no more were printed. Since everyone used the Internet, their already old and decaying dictionaries went unused. I believe this dictionary here is the newest and highest quality English dictionary in existence. The others, I fear, might now be unusable."

"That's sad," I said. "What'll happen if all the dictionaries disappear, now that the Internet is gone?"

Metzger swung the cabinet door shut with a loud creak.

"Horrible things."

The professor then turned his back and walked out, leaving David and I to stare at the very important dictionary.