I sat with a long time friend for a conversation. Curiously, our topic was “conversation.” We reminisced about the things we used to talk about ages ago, most of the time over the few available books and current affairs from a couple of international news media outlets. It was those days when access to books was limited, and the internet was not around, least of all taken for granted as it is now.

After a little while, it was time we had to part ways. While we were leaving the café, my friend started to lament about the decreasing number of conversations he has these days with his two sons at home. I wished I could have heard more from him on that, yet it could not happen because of urgent commitments curtailing the important conversation.

Later on, as I arrived at my house, I started to ponder over our struggle not to get through with conversations. The threat posed by the cutthroat competition from algorithmic tools backed and tailored to one's taste, “images” rather than “ideas” dominated exchanges on social media. The ongoing technological changes do not look good for the future of conversation.

The rise of memes and GIFs does not bode well for our use of languages, with the vocabulary we use sparingly. The four most common spoken English words are “I,” “you,” “the,” and “a,” according to Stuart Berg Flexner. Ten basic words account for a quarter of all English speech, while 50 simple words account for about 60pc. This is despite the hundreds of thousands of words in the English language.

This does not mean that verbosity automatically translates to good conversations and communication. What Charles A. Beardsley, lawyer, told his colleagues comes to mind.

“Beware of and eschew pompous prolixity,” he said, referring to legal talk that has nothing to do with communication.

“Legalese” consists principally of long-windedness, stilted phrases such as “Know all men by these presents,” redundancies including “separate and apart” or “aid and abet.” It includes non-English words that sound unnecessarily complex, like caveat emptor(“let the buyer beware”) or amicus curiae (“friend of the court”). Despite the efforts of Beardsley and many others, the situation has not improved much to this day.

The opposite of this is probably Imagism, a brief yet influential poetry movement in the early 20th century. It was broadly characterised by brevity, precision, purity of texture and concentration of meaning.