5 Verbicide
In the beginning was the Word.
—John 1:1
He entered my office for advice as a freshman advisee sporting nearly
perfect SAT scores and an impeccable academic record—by all accounts
a young man of considerable promise. During a 20-minute
conversation about his academic future, however, he displayed a vocabulary
that consisted mostly of two words: “cool” and “really.” Almost
800 SAT points hitched to each word. To be fair, he could use
them interchangeably as “really cool” or “cool . . . really!” He could also
use them singly, presumably for emphasis. When he became one of
my students in a subsequent class I confirmed that my first impression
of the young scholar was largely accurate and that his vocabulary, and
presumably his mind, consisted predominantly of words and images
derived from overexposure to television and the new jargon of computer-
speak. He is no aberration, but an example of a larger problem,
not of illiteracy but of diminished literacy in a culture that often sees
little reason to use words carefully, however abundantly. Increasingly,
student papers, from otherwise very good students, have whole paragraphs
that sound like advertising copy. Whether students are talking
or writing, a growing number have a tenuous grasp on a declining vocabulary.
Excise “uh . . . like . . . uh” from virtually any teenage conversation,
and the effect is like sticking a pin into a balloon.
In the past 50 years, by one reckoning, the working vocabulary of
the average 14-year-old has declined from some 25,000 words to
10,000 words (“Harper’s Index” 2000). This reflects not merely a decline
in numbers of words but in the capacity to think. It also reflects
a steep decline in the number of things that an adolescent needs to
know and to name in order to get by in an increasingly homogenized
and urbanized consumer society. This is a national tragedy virtually
unnoticed in the media. It is no mere coincidence that in roughly the
same half century the average person has learned to recognize more
than 1,000 corporate logos but can recognize fewer than 10 plants
and animals native to their locality (Hawken 1993, 214). That fact
says a great deal about why the decline in working vocabulary has
gone unnoticed—few are paying attention. The decline is surely not
consistent across the full range of language but concentrates in those
areas having to do with large issues such as philosophy, religion, public
policy, and nature. On the other hand, vocabulary has probably increased
in areas having to do with sex, violence, recreation, and consumption.
As a result, we are losing the capacity to say what we really
mean and ultimately to think about what we mean.We are losing the
capacity for articulate intelligence about the things that matter most.
“That sucks,” for example, is a common way for budding young scholars
to announce their displeasure about any number of issues that
range across the full spectrum of human experience. But it can also be
used to indicate a general displeasure with the entire cosmos. Whatever
the target, it is the linguistic equivalent of using duct tape for
holding disparate thoughts in rough proximity to some vague emotion
of dislike.
The problem is not confined to teenagers or young adults. It is
part of a national epidemic of incoherence evident in our public discourse,
street talk, movies, television, and music. We have all heard
popular music that consisted mostly of pre-Neanderthal grunts. We
have witnessed “conversation” on TV talk shows that would have em-
barrassed retarded chimpanzees. We have listened to politicians of
national reputation proudly mangle logic and language in less than a
paragraph, although they can do it on a larger scale as well. However
manifested, it is aided and abetted by academics, including whole departments
specializing in various forms of postmodernism and the
deconstruction of one thing or another. They propounded ideas that
everything was relative, hence largely inconsequential, and that the
use of language was an exercise in power, hence to be devalued. They
taught, in other words, a pseudo-intellectual contempt for clarity,
careful argument, and felicitous expression. Being scholars of their
word, they also wrote without clarity, argument, and felicity. Remove
half a dozen arcane words from any number of academic papers written
in the past 10 years and the argument—whatever it was—evaporates.
But the situation is not much better elsewhere in the academy
where thought is often fenced in by disciplinary jargon. The fact is
that educators have all too often been indifferent trustees of language.
This explains, I think, why the academy has been a lame critic of what
ails the world from the preoccupation with self to technology run
amuck.We have been unable to speak out against the barbarism engulfing
the larger culture because we are part of the process of barbarization
that begins with the devaluation of language.
The decline of language, noted by commentators such as H. L.
Mencken, George Orwell, William Safire, and Edwin Newman, is
nothing new. Language is always coming undone. Why? For one thing,
it is always under assault by those who intend to control others by first
seizing the words and metaphors by which people describe their
world. The goal is to give partisan aims the appearance of inevitability
by diminishing the sense of larger possibilities. In our time language is
under assault by those whose purpose it is to sell one kind of quackery
or another: economic, political, religious, or technological. It is under
attack because the clarity and felicity of language (as distinct from its
quantity) is devalued in an industrial-technological society. The clear
and artful use of language is, in fact, threatening to that society. As a
result we have highly distorted and atrophied conversations about ultimate
meanings, ethics, public purposes, or the means by which we
live. Since we cannot solve problems that we cannot name, one result
of our misuse of language is a growing agenda of unsolved problems
that cannot be adequately described in words and metaphors derived
from our own creations such as machines and computers.
V E R B I C I D E 55
Second, language is in decline because it is being balkanized
around the specialized vocabularies characteristic of an increasingly
specialized society. The highly technical language of the expert is, of
course, both bane and blessing. It is useful for describing fragments of
the world, but not for describing how these fit into a coherent whole.
But things work as whole systems, whether or not we can say it and
whether or not we perceive it. And more than anything else, it is coherence
our culture lacks, not specialized knowledge. Genetic engineering,
for example, can be described as a technical matter in the
language of molecular biology. But saying what the act of rearranging
the genetic fabric of earth means requires an altogether different language
and a mind-set that seeks to discover larger patterns. Similarly,
the specialized language of economics does not begin to describe the
state of our well-being, whatever it reveals about how much we may
or may not possess. Regardless of these arguments, over and over the
language of the specialist trumps that of the generalist—the specialist
in whole things. The result is that the capacity to think carefully
about ends, as distinct from means, has all but disappeared from our
public and private conversations.
Third, language reflects the range and depth of our experience,
but our experience of the world is being impoverished to the extent
that it is rendered artificial and prepackaged. Most of us no longer
have the experience of skilled physical work on farms or in forests.
Consequently words and metaphors based on intimate knowledge of
soils, plants, trees, animals, landscapes, and rivers have declined. “Cut
off from this source,”Wendell Berry writes, “language becomes a paltry
work of conscious purpose, at the service and the mercy of expedient
aims” (1983, 33). Our experience of an increasingly uniform
and ugly world is being engineered and shrink-wrapped by recreation
and software industries and pedaled back to us as “fun” or “information.”
We’ve become a nation of television watchers and Internet
browsers, and it shows in the way we talk and what we talk about.
More and more we speak as if we are voyeurs furtively peeking in on
life, not active participants, moral agents, or engaged citizens.
Fourth, we are no longer held together, as we once were, by the
reading of a common literature or by listening to great stories and so
cannot draw on a common set of metaphors and images as we once
did. Allusions to the Bible and great works of literature no longer resonate
because they are simply unfamiliar to a growing number of
people. This is so in part because the consensus about what is worth
reading has come undone. But the debate about a worthy canon is
hardly the whole story. The ability to read serious literature with seriousness
is diminished by overexposure to television and computers
that overdevelop the visual sense. The desire to read is jeopardized by
the same forces that would make us a violent, shallow, hedonistic, and
materialistic people. As a nation we risk coming undone because our
language is coming undone and our language is coming undone because
one by one we are being undone.
The problem of language is a global problem. Of the roughly
5,000 languages now spoken on earth, only 150 or so are expected to
survive to the year 2100. Language everywhere is being whittled
down to the dimensions of the global economy and homogenized to
accord with the imperatives of the information age. This represents a
huge loss of cultural information and a blurring of our capacity to understand
the world and our place in it. And it represents a losing bet
that a few people armed with the words, metaphors, and mindset
characteristic of industry and technology that flourished destructively
for a few decades can, in fact, manage the earth, a different, more
complex, and longer-lived thing altogether.
Because we cannot think clearly about what we cannot say
clearly, the first casualty of linguistic incoherence is our ability to
think well about many things. This is a reciprocal process. Language,
George Orwell once wrote, “becomes ugly and inaccurate because
our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it
easier for us to have foolish thoughts” (1981, 157). In our time the
words and metaphors of the consumer economy are often a product
of foolish thoughts as well as evidence of bad language. Under the onslaught
of commercialization and technology, we are losing the sense
of wholeness and time that is essential to a decent civilization.We are
losing, in short, the capacity to articulate what is most important to
us. And the new class of corporate chiefs, global managers, genetic engineers,
and money speculators has no words with which to describe
the fullness and beauty of life or to announce its role in the larger
moral ecology. They have no metaphors by which they can say how
we fit together in the community of life and so little idea beyond that
of self-interest about why we ought to protect it. They have, in short,
no language that will help humankind navigate through the most
dangerous epoch in its history. On the contrary, they will do all in
V E R B I C I D E 57
their power to reduce language to the level of utility, function, management,
self-interest, and the short term. Evil begins not only with
words used with malice; it can begin with words that merely diminish
people, land, and life to some fragment that is less than whole and less
than holy. The prospects for evil, I believe, will grow as those for language
decline.
We have an affinity for language, and that capacity makes us
human. When language is devalued, misused, or corrupted, so too are
those who speak it and those who hear it. On the other hand, we are
never better than when we use words clearly, eloquently, and civilly.
Language does not merely reflect the relative clarity of mind; it can elevate
thought and ennoble our behavior. Abraham Lincoln’s words at
Gettysburg in 1863, for example, gave meaning to the terrible sacrifices
of the Civil War. Similarly,Winston Churchill’s words moved an
entire nation to do its duty in the dark hours of 1940. If we intend to
protect and enhance our humanity, we must first decide to protect
and enhance language and fight everything that undermines and
cheapens it.
What does this mean in practical terms? How do we design language
facility back into the culture? My first suggestion is to restore
the habit of talking directly to each other—whatever the loss in economic
efficiency. To that end I propose that we begin by smashing
every device used to communicate in place of a real person, beginning
with answering machines. Messages like “Your call is important to us”
or “For more options, please press five, or if you would like to talk to a
real person, please stay on the line” are the death rattle of a coherent
culture. Hell, yes, I want to talk to a real person, and preferably one
who is competent and courteous!
My second suggestion is to restore the habit of public reading.
One of my very distinctive childhood memories was attending a public
reading of Shakespeare by the British actor Charles Laughton.
With no prop other than a book, he read with energy and passion for
two hours and kept a large audience enthralled, including one eightyear-
old boy. No movie was ever as memorable to me. Further, I propose
that adults should turn off the television, disconnect the cable,
undo the computer, and once again read good books aloud to their
children. I know of no better or more pleasurable way to stimulate
thinking, encourage a love of language, and facilitate the child’s ability
to form images.
Third, those who corrupt language ought to be held accountable
for what they do—beginning with the advertising industry. In 1997
the advertising industry spent an estimated $187 billion to sell us an
unconscionable amount of stuff, much of it useless, environmentally
destructive, and deleterious to our health. They fuel the fires of consumerism
that are consuming the earth and our children’s future.
They regard the public with utter contempt—as little more than a
herd of sheep to be manipulated to buy anything at the highest possible
cost and at any consequence. Dante would have consigned them
to the lowest level of hell, only because there was no worse place to
put them.We should too. Barring that excellent idea, we should insist
that they abide by community standards of truthfulness in selling
what they peddle, including full disclosure of what the products do to
the environment and to those who use them.
Fourth, language, I believe, grows from the outside in, from the
periphery to center. It is renewed in the vernacular where human intentions
intersect particular places, circumstances, and by the everyday
acts of authentic living and speaking. It is, by the same logic, corrupted
by contrivance, pretense, and fakery. The center where power
and wealth work by contrivance, pretense, and fakery does not create
language so much as exploit it. To facilitate control, it would make
our language as uniform and dull as the interstate highway system.
Given its way, we would have only one newspaper, a super–USA
Today. Our thoughts and words would mirror those popular in Washington,
New York, Boston, or Los Angeles. From the perspective of
the center, the merger of ABC and Disney is okay because it can see
no difference between entertainment and news. To preserve the vernacular
places where language grows, we need to protect the independence
of local newspapers and local radio stations. We need to
protect local culture in all of its forms from domination by national
media, markets, and power. Understanding that cultural diversity and
biological diversity are different faces of the same coin, we must protect
those parts of our culture where memory, tradition, and devotion
to place still exist.
Finally, because language is the only currency wherever men and
women pursue truth, there should be no higher priority for schools,
colleges, and universities than to defend the integrity and clarity of
language in every way possible.We must instill in our students an appreciation
for language, literature, and words well crafted and used to
V E R B I C I D E 59
good ends. As teachers we should insist on good writing. We should
assign books and readings that are well written. We should restore
rhetoric, the ability to speak clearly and well, to the liberal arts curriculum.
Our own speaking and writing ought to demonstrate clarity
and truthfulness. And we, too, should be held accountable for what
we say.
In terms of sheer volume of words, factoids, and data of all kinds, this
is surely an information age. But in terms of understanding, wisdom,
spiritual clarity, and civility, we have entered a darker age. We are
drowning in a sea of words with nary a drop to drink.We are in the
process of committing what C. S. Lewis once called “verbicide”
(Aeschliman 1983, 5). The volume of words in our time is inversely
related to our capacity to use them well and to think clearly about
what they mean. It is no wonder that during a dreary century of
gulags, genocide, global wars, and horrible weapons, our use of language
was dominated by propaganda and advertising and controlled
by language technicians. “We have a sense of evil,” Susan Sontag has
said, but we no longer have “the religious or philosophical language
to talk intelligently about evil” (Miller 1998, 55). That being so for
the twentieth century, what will be said at the end of the twenty-first
century, when the stark realities of climatic change and biotic impoverishment
will become fully apparent? Can we summon the clarity
of mind to speak the words necessary to cause us to do what in hindsight
will merely appear to have been obvious all along?