Thanks! I always say. 

Thanks for your time. Thanks for the thing you gave me. Thanks for the compassion. 

It rings hollow though. Like a knock-off gold necklace hitting the table with a low-guage ka-Ching!

Why does this word feel so  cheap to me? It's too short, or even - one might say - a cartoonish version of the Victorian or Elizabethan expressions of gratitude. "I'm immensely gratified..." for instance. 

It doesn't do it any justice is what I say. 

But then again, isn't modern Language just like modern money? 

It gets passed through the hands (and sometimes anal cavities) of prisoners, and then back to you through others ultimately. 

This is the nature of modern language. It's passed through the mouths of so many underwhelming people; of so many people who are simply awful and many times downright cruddy, that it's a bit like putting dirty cutlery in your mouth from a greasy pub where nothing gets cleaned properly whenever you say these words. 

We've cheapened language so much that it's fine to say "I'm good" when actually you're well or "Have a nice day" when actually you mean "Have a splendid afternoon."

In this way we reject the notion that language is the common currency of the masses. 

But there is, especially now, a tendency to make ourselves palatable to the masses. 

Herein lies the question of trauma. We want to remind people - at the very least ourselves - that language, like reality has many levels. The ecstatic and the prosaic, the gruesome and the plain boring. But we cannot do this in today's society for fear of alienating someone. We are always 

We always have to think: "what if someone's poverty has caused them too much trauma"... to accept expressive language as a valid means of reasoning things out? What if they will resent you, on account of various social conventions, for using language that is out of touch with their neighborhood, or their family or whatever. 

And this is how language dies, really. It becomes subsistent on the wishes of the meanest common denominator. We can no longer elevate ourselves from the gutter. We are not allowed to do so. We are forced, as a matter of principle to speak emotionally rather than precisely. Or where emotion is required, we cannot elevate that emotion above sexual innuendo. 

And of course, the process only feeds itself. As the quality of language declines, so do does the quality of our collective reality. And that in turn breeds more ugly and ham-handed, loutish language.