Are you a true bi-tech-tual?

There are those who will tell you that “bitechtual” means one who uses both Android and Apple products (I’m one). But I think we logophiles can do better when it comes to using and defining this playful word.

Think of bilingual and bicoastal: they both assume a pronounced division between a commonality. For bilingual, it’s two different languages; for bicoastal, two different coasts. Has anyone ever confused Urdu for English, or the Pacific for the Atlantic?

So let’s give “bitechtual” the same clean dichotomy: a pronounced division between high technology and low, fast tech and slow, digital and old-fashioned. When we define it this way, that makes a lot more of us bitechtual.

I keystroked this blog on a desktop, but first I wrote it on paper. I count on the Breaking News alerts from the New York Times that come through on my smartphone and tablet, but I still savor the rustle and fold of the Sunday paper version. My husband and I dip into different sections, folding them back and swapping them out as the Sunday afternoon progresses, sharing the singular act of reading in a way that only the actual newsprint allows. (Then we recycle it.)

My young friend Sofia (who is bilingual) watches with rapt attention as her older sister swipes across images of antelopes on the iPad. But her little three-year-old hands also reach eagerly for the Beatrix Potter books on my bookshelf.

I fact-check through Google any number of times through the day. It’s fast, efficient and, provided you pull from reputable sources, accurate. But these are discrete and often disparate items I’m checking. There is still something to be said for seeing forest as well as trees, so please don’t try to take away my print edition of Word Menu and the context it provides.

Being bitechtual in this way lets us adapt technologies to the circumstances. Despite the dichotomy between paper and pixel, “bitechtual” as we’ve now defined it carries the suggestion of coexistence as well. Even though my mother had to remind me the other day to check my old and tattered address book for the number that wasn’t programmed into my phone, I think I will always be bitechtual.

 With one exception.

I’ve realized that, when it comes to geography and directions, I am utterly a-techtual. It’s almost as if the GPS Lady knows I can’t read a paper map, so she feels free to send me off anywhere but where I wanted to be. Well, there’s always the sun.

A Smart-Words Manifesto

The trend is encouraging: there are Smart Cars, smart buildings, even smart cows (or at least, Smart Balance margarine and Simply Smart milk). We’re shown how to be smart about money, perhaps because more of us have less of it thanks to the price of that margarine and milk.

Isn’t it time we started being smart about our words?

In one sense, we already are. English is a finicky language, filled with rules and exceptions to them. And, just to keep us on our linguistic toes, it’s rarely met a language it didn’t like and want to borrow from.

Thus we have words from Sanskrit (juggernaut) and Algonquin (mugwump) and French (dishabille) and Spanish (aficionado) and Latin (caveat) and Greek (hubris) and German (Schadenfreude) and plenty more.

The number of words in the English language hovers at around a quarter of a million, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (which Ammon Shea, a fellow word-lover, recently read in its entirety). Only the number of guys who’ve wished they were Tiger Woods surpasses this.

Certainly, English is one of the most…verbose of the world languages. The fact that most of us who speak the language can string together coherent sentences says much about our smarts.

Isn’t it time we showed the world our smarter selves? Why not use more of this vast wealth of words at our fingertips?

It doesn’t always have to be about the big, Bill Buckley words. It’s really about using the right words—the ones that send a little frisson of pleasure down the spine when you hear them or read them or write them. (Really, words can do that.)

As a nation, we’ve been Dummied down too long. The assumption seems to have been that because we don’t know something—how to say eleemosynary, for example—we can’t learn. Nonsense.

Americans have been smart enough to figure how to keep a democracy relatively intact for more than 200 years. (Winston Churchill once described democracy as “the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,” and then used his mastery of the language to help protect it from ruin.) If we can do that, surely we can figure out how to put more words to work for us.

Once upon a time America had eloquent leaders—Kennedy, Lincoln, John Adams and just about everyone in his crowd. Perhaps we will again. Eloquence has a way of uplifting, of bringing out “the better angels of our nature,” as Lincoln said—even if it means bringing out, or clicking onto, the dictionary.

We Americans don’t need to be talked down to. We’re smarter than that. It’s about time we showed this better angel of our nature to the world, and to ourselves.

(About eleemosynary—it’s a long way of saying “depending on charity” and is pronounced ell-ee-uh-MAH-sin-ar-ee.)

And what do you think, oh smart one reading this—do you agree? I’d love to hear from you. Please post your Comment…and let’s have words.