What marks our generation, and certainly the one breathing over our shoulder, is it's endemic and infuriating inarticulacy. Straightforward conversation no longer happens. Once an anecdote might have unfolded in a reasonable narrative flow, A then B on to C, and so on, with an occasional space for an interjection or pause, it's changed now, the sequence has blown, every thing's jumbled. The interjection IS the conversation.

Those evil filler words - 'like' as in "she said...like...", " know what I mean" (I don't, so why are you insisting that I might?), and the cockroach of them all, innit - all of these pass as vocabulary for millions now.

Frightening enough just on their own; but when a conversation contains nothing but these, and everyone who's jabbering away knows precisely what everyone else is on about despite the utter paucity of expression, it's terrifying.

I've no idea how people understand each other. Perhaps it's all body language, or intonation that counts. I'm as mystified as I am saddened that we're in this state.

How we found our self peering down this linguistic dead-end is something I've yet to fathom. Someone I know has a theory which does hold water though; for him: "It's a symptom of being a stranger to prose narrative. It's an entire generation weaned on comic books, TV, and movies. Dialogue is all they know."

Not too far off the mark there. I'd also throw in the mesmerising effect of e-mail, text messaging, social media, the 140 character straitjacket that you know what makes people wear. The compulsion to talk when there's probably nothing to really talk about, and as nature abhors a vacuum then what else can we expect than filler words slithering in to take their place.

Thoreau got it right; people, he believed, behaved, "...as if the main object were to talk fast and not sensibly" This from a man who lived in mid nineteenth century America. That, in it's own way, throws up this puzzle: if he said that then and it's still true today, then what exactly is a good conversation? Does it need to follow my prescription, and only that, or can the two coexist without one asphyxiating the other?