A pervasive feature of the 21^st century in North America is the deterioration in the quality of written language. Words with a quite precise meanings, like ‘phone’, ‘mail’, ‘email’ and ‘text’ get replaced with the coverall ‘reach out’.

I have access to exactly one internet streaming service, and it provides one of the more amusing examples of language abuse in the warnings it attaches to the previews of the films that one can watch on it.

Now, some of these warnings are easily understandable: Nudity, Sex, Violence – the Classics. Attaching any of these to the preview of a film is particularly useful to any teens or pre-teens who live in the household. I have experience from an earlier era. In my pre-teen years my good Polish Catholic parents subscribed to The Catholic Chronicle, a weekly paper put out by the local diocese. This featured a lot of boring stuff I never read, but it also provided ratings of all the movies that would be shown that week on the 5 or 6 TV stations available in our town. Those ratings told me which channel to put on when I stayed up past my parents’ bedtime on Friday or Saturday night. I was most grateful to the Bishop for this service, even though nothing on TV in that era was actually all that scandalous. It doesn’t really take much to get a 12-year-old boy excited.

However, contemporary warning words beyond that Big Three are rather more mysterious to me.

One warning is Language. Not Profanity, not Cussin’, not even Bad Language, just – Language. That seems to suggest that the characters in the film are going to talk, but there is also another warning of Pervasive Language. I suppose it is useful for some people to know there will be a lot of talking, so they should pause the stream if they have to go to the bathroom.

There is also a warning for Smoking, which I presume is due to our enlightened age realizing that all it takes is for some young’n to see someone smoking in a film to provoke them to go out and steal some smokes and try it themselves.

However, there is also a distinct warning about Historical Smoking. Clearly this would be attached to a film set in the past in which people smoke. What is not clear to me is whether the distinction is made because seeing past smoking is more or less harmful than seeing current smoking. Whichever way it is, why is there not then a warning about Historical Nudity (Adam and Eve?) or Historical Violence (Conan the Barbarian?) or, really – Historical Sex; you know, before people knew how to do it right like we do.

Undoubtedly, the biggest mystery to me is when a film preview comes with this warning:

Some Thematic Elements

Whatever in the hell does that mean? I can’t even make a joke about it.

One might think that, whatever the environment, posting a warning whose meaning is unclear would be a terrible idea. Do we want Environment Canada putting out Alerts that say Something Might be Coming? [I admit, EnvCan’s Special Weather Statements are pretty close to that.]

However, here in the 21st century, when offence lurks around every corner, it may be that posting a warning on a film the meaning of which no one understands has value.

Consider this scenario – a subscriber phones up or texts the customer service dept of the service.

Subscriber: “Hey that movie had a blonde-haired woman chasing a blue aardvark around with a flyswatter, that was appalling, I had no idea me and the kids  would be exposed to that. What is wrong with you people?”

Customer Service: “Ah, but Madam, we did make it clear the movie contained Some Thematic Elements.”