“There was a time“
When a man could write a letter in pencil on a feed sack and be taken seriously — because the words carried the weight, not the desk.
Now we’re told meaning must arrive dressed for acception: fonts aligned, grammar polished to sterile shine, emotion run through a spellchecker. We’ve traded freedom of style for fear of disapproval.
In the old world, grammar was a guidepost, not a cage. A sentence could bend to serve rhythm or reason; a paragraph could wander like thought itself. That looseness gave language its soul. It made room for character — for humanity’s nuances.
Today, the self-appointed gatekeepers of “professionalism” treat form as virtue and individuality as error. They’ll critique the font before the philosophy. They mistake presentation for presence.
They call it professionalism, but it’s really performative perfection — a religion of surfaces. They judge by symmetry instead of sincerity, by polish instead of purpose.
When presentation outperforms content, truth goes unemployed.
When grammar becomes a competition, meaning loses its citizenship.
We’ve built a world where trust is measured by branding, not behavior, and curiosity is replaced by critique. People no longer listen to discover; they inspect to dismiss.
In the older days, a rough draft with soul could still stop a room. It sparked questions, not corrections. It drew people in because it sounded alive. Today, the algorithm rewards compliance. Everything must look approved before it’s believed.
But wisdom doesn’t care for clean lines. It shows up where the ink runs and the words don’t fit in their boxes. The same goes for trust — it isn’t earned by aesthetic, it’s built through honest intent.
Even our simplest words have lost their footing. “Stop” and “No” once carried moral gravity — limits that taught respect, caution, and restraint. Now they’re treated as suggestions, or worse, as insults. Words bend to vanity instead of truth. They’ve become mirrors of emotion rather than instruments of meaning.
And that’s how a culture loses its compass — not through war, but through word decay.
Meaning has never lived in margins or kerning. It lives in conviction. In the courage to say what you mean — even when it’s not pretty.
Because truth doesn’t need formatting to stand upright. It just needs a voice that still remembers what words were made for,communication in the real world, not somone elses.
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