We want it, want to believe it will always be there for us, even as we demote it to the soulless word house and groan about the long hours spent going back there for the holidays.
Forget the whole idea of "networking". It's a soulless, mechanistic word that encourages people to think of each other as instrumental cogs in a machine.
My English Words was about the way those initially soulless and alien words begin to assert their familiarity, bringing with them their entire manners, their clothes, and the way they swim in clouds "above the steam of kettles".
If house is the dance music that celebrates humans, techno is the genre that praises machines -- "banging," "soulless" or "relentless" are words that techno DJs might be proud to have associated with their sets.
In early 2000, as his enormous bottling facility in Napa was nearing completion, James Laube, of Wine Spectator, wrote, "The worst-case scenario is that millions of cases of soulless wine carrying the word Napa could flood the market and dilute the meaning and value of Napa's name.
There was also a veiled reference to last spring's controversy in the words of a soulless council functionary who had misgivings about Derek's employment.
Somewhere in the process of its evolution from Benton's original metal type to the readily available digital one it had lost some of its spirit, becoming "a hybrid digital soulless version," in Mr. Pusz's words.
I submit to you that, increasingly, this is how Clinical Standard Written English sounds to the Reddit-reading masses: orthodox, lifeless, soulless, a parade of pale impersonal zombie words drained of blood by some linguistic vampire, if you'll pardon the mixed horror-movie metaphor.
A handfull of shorthaired, zit-faced, skinny, soulless guys polishing their rifles echoed the words.
Digital technology, in other words, need not be a sleek, soulless force; it can embrace nature, teem with life.
