#209 What up

The other night I thought my house had been attacked by a gaggle of gangstas. I heard this buzzing noise and then a group of voices shouting muffled obscenities with a thumping back beat. Turned out my home hadn’t been broken into. My wonderful son had left his cellphone on the windowsill near the entryway. The buzzing was the vibrator of the phone and the gang of almost f-words was his ringtone. Great, just the thing to go off in church during Father Hart’s sermon on the breakdown of society caused by today’s youth.
In any event, when that gentlemanly young fellow that I call my son answered the phone, he did so thusly: He grabbed the phone, which by then had quit its string of pseudo profanity as the caller had given up and hung up. No problem. My son looked at its screen, ascertained both the last number and the identity of the caller and then punched the return button so the phone automatically connected him with his partner in puberty. Now this may sound unremarkable to you who are bluetooth enabled, but this beige-toothed old fart thinks it’s amazing indeed. In my day if you missed a call, you were just plain spit out of luck. Oh sure, if you were Broderick Crawford of the Highway Patrol you could wake up Millie, the switchboard operator and have her check her handwritten records in the middle of the night but for ordinary schmoes like us, uh uh.
At this point my young whippersnapper declares his readiness to converse amicably into the phone’s mouthpiece with these two words: “What up?” To which my brain instantly responded: “What is up with that?” Now it seems to me we’ve lost something here. It used to be “What is going on with you?” or “What is happening?” At some point, as it will always occur in or contraction-ifying society, that was shortened to, “What’s happening?” To which I say, dyno-mite. “What’s happening” flows so much nicer off the tongue. There was a brief period of convoluted queries with the odd question, “What it is?” Fortunately “What it is” was retired and replaced by “What’s up.” “What is up” to “What’s up.” But now, it appears to have been shortened even further to “What up.” We’ve contracted the contraction by totally eliminating the verb or any vestige thereof from the interrogative sentence. What up? What up is we don’t have a freaking verb. And that verb is “is.” “Is” is gone. Now perhaps “is” was sullied when a former president asked about its definition, but to retire it from conversation altogether is impossible. “Is” is the third person singular present indicative of “be.” Without is we cannot be. What will be up if we cannot be will be bad, bad indeed. Talk about a breakdown in society.
Why, I feel like muttering a string of obscenities...
America, ya gotta love it.