English is the only language I know, and I speak it fairly well. At least, I used to. Now I'm not so sure.

My wife and I recently received a letter from our wi-fi provider, and while I recognized the words, I wasn't sure what they meant.

The letter began, "Hargray is streamlining the product offerings across its family of brands aiming to phase out older plans with limited bandwidth options and providing access to their latest offers."

The letter went on: "Please take note of the migration and new internet/data speed levels." The first example: "Customers currently subscribed to 200/20mbps (or lower) will be migrated to 300/30mbps."

While Hargray is a communications company — it provides telephone service, cable TV and wi-fi — it doesn't communicate well. Well, few companies do. I assume in this case that Hargray is upgrading its wi-fi service, and could have said that in so many word instead of distracting me with gobbledygook that included "family of brands." (I wondered: What brands?)

NEXT I was puzzled by the words "migration" and "migrated," which I believe were misused. Seems to me Hargray is simply replacing one service for another. Services are implemented, people and animals migrate, though there are cases where people who provide services are uprooted by an external force. (You'd never describe the first two hundred years of our history as a time many Africans migrated to America.)

Communication has taken a big hit since advertising agencies and computer geeks seized control of the world. For proof, visit The Apple Store or any place that sells computers or cellphones. People who work there are creatures from another planet.

(I do not know — nor care to know — the difference between "Liquid Retina display" and "Liquid Retina XDR display," or between an Apple M2 chip and an Apple M3 chip. Or whether my computer has a 16-core Neural Engine and hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC and a ProRes encode and decode engine. Just assure me that the damn thing works.)

IT WAS AT the Providence Journal years ago that I was indoctrinated to use a Mac. So it made sense to purchase an iMac for my personal use. Mind you, I love the iMac, and my complaints would exist no matter what computer I owned. Their products may be different, but computer companies all promote instant obsolescence.

My current iMac, purchased in 2017, has an operating system called High Sierra. Since my purchase, Mac has changed the operating system at least six times.

While I enjoy the OS names — Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey, etc. — I think many changes from system to system were made for the sake of change, and to prompt us to buy a new computer.

What's annoying are little problems you can eliminate yourself — if you knew how. You turn to Google for an instructional video from Apple, then notice you're led to a page on System Preferences that looks nothing like the same page on your system. I almost always have to search for a video or instructions posted by a Mac user who has no affiliation with the company.

YOU CAN phone Apple for help, and I'll admit their tech support people, once you reach them, have been enormously helpful, though we always struggle to make each other understood, either because he or she must be in India, and has a thick accent, or I'm using the wrong words to describe my problem.

And the greatest experience I've ever had in dealing with any company occurred during a call to Apple. My computer has an external DVD player, and when it mysteriously stopped functioning, the helpful support person on the other end took my name and address and promised to send me another one. It arrived the next day. No cost.

Upgrading your system is an option, and in 2022 I did just that, but could upgrade no further than OS Catalina, introduced in 2019. A quick reading of a story online — not the best place for reliable information — said this was a safe upgrade.

Too late I learned several applications that work perfectly on High Sierra were shut out of Catalina. Something about 64 bits versus 32 bits. Bits of what, I don't know.

Though I managed the upgrade myself, I lacked the confidence to delete Catalina and retrieve High Sierra, so I contacted a computer guy, and a day later my problem was gone. (During my brief time with Catalina, I ordered new versions of Photoshop and Dreamweaver, only to discover applications with earlier versions that had been easy to use had been replaced by versions beyond my comprehension, so I returned them.)

I DON'T ASK much of a computer. I want an application that lets me try to finish a novel I started back in the 1970s; another that lets me go online, and a couple that help me maintain and decorate a website. I appreciate having hundreds of family photos neatly stored, and I occasionally listen to music I have stored on iTunes.

This means I have no use for about half of the applications on my iMac, things such as FaceTime, GarageBand, iBooks, iMovie, QuickTime Player, Siri and Stickies. And I want nothing to do with iCloud.

Maybe I'd like them if I tried them, but I don't have the time nor the inclination.

Coincidentally, while writing this, Hargray sent another letter, and it was what I call an Emily Litella moment. Gilda Radner created Emily, a creature who would rant about things until she discovered she had been misinformed. Then she'd simply say, "Never mind."

In this case, Hargray told us the change in our service will not affect our bill, but I still have no idea what that change is, and I'm confident I will not notice it. Apparently, in our case, no migration will be made.

BUT BACK to the beginning and our ever-changing language, and how many recent changes have obscured or camouflaged the actual meaning.

George Carlin did a classic routine on the subject, using this as an example:

In World War I, battle-tested soldiers often suffered from shell shock. These two words accurately and specifically described their condition.

In World War II, that condition was described as battle fatigue. Twice as many syllables, and "fatigue" is almost a comforting word, while "shock" is jarring.

A few years later, our troops found themselves in Korea and some unbelievably brutal battles, particularly after the China entered the war. A new phrase was created. Many of our soldiers were afflicted with operational exhaustion. Eight syllables that could be a synonym for carpal tunnel syndrome.

Then came Vietnam, and a hyphen found its way into the new description: post-traumatic stress disorder.

Carlin's contention: shell shock said it best.

THE LATE comedian also had this to say about poverty:

"Poor people used to live in slums. Now 'the economically disadvantaged' occupy 'substandard housing' in the 'inner cities.' And a lot of them are broke. They don't have 'negative cash flow.' They're broke! Because many of them were fired. In other words, management wanted to 'curtail redundancies in the human resources area,' and so, many workers are no longer 'viable members of the workforce.'

And Jules Feiffer wrote this for a caption in a 1965 cartoon:

"I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me deprived was a bad image, I was underprivileged. Then they told me underprivileged was over-used, I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary."

Many euphemisms are intended to be more positive than words they replace, or, at least, less negative. Unfortunately, when you string a lot of them together, your statements are meaningless.

Euphemisms usually are longer than the words they replace, while otherwise — in the social media especially — the goal is to communicate with fewer keystrokes, such shortcuts as IMO (in my opinon), LMK (let me know), NBD (no big deal) and the confusing LOL (originally "lots of luck" or "lots of love," but now more commonly translated as "laughing out loud.")

I don't know who decides these things, but in our house LOL appears only on grocery shopping lists and it stands for "Land of Lakes," not the butter, but the creamer we use in our coffee.