Taken from the July-August 2000 Issue of Utne
Reader
He entered my office as a freshman advisee sporting nearly
perfect SAT scores and an impeccable academic record�a young man of
considerable promise. During a 20-minute conversation, however, he displayed a
vocabulary that consisted mostly of two words: cool and really.
Almost 800 SAT points hitched to each word. He is no aberration, but an example
of diminished literacy in a culture that often fails to use words carefully.
In the past 50 years, by one reckoning, the working
vocabulary of the average 14-year-old has declined from 25,000 words to 10,000.
This is a decline not merely in words, but also in the capacity opt think. We
are losing the capacity to say what we mean, and ultimately to think about what
we mean, about the things that matter most.
The problem is not confined to teenagers and young adults.
A national epidemic of incoherence is evident in public discourse, street talk,
movies, television, and music. Nor is the problem new. As H.L. Mencken, William
Safire, and other commentators have noted, language is always coming undone.
Why? First, those who intend to control others seize the words and metaphors by
which people describe their world; in our time, the attackers are trying to sell
one kind of quackery of another: economic, political, religious, or
technological. The clarity and felicity of language�as distinct from its
quantity�is devalued in an industrial-technological society. In fact, clear,
artful language threatens that society.
Second, language is in decline because it is being
balkanized by specialized vocabularies. 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 they fit into a coherent
whole. The language of molecular biology can describe genetic engineering, but
interpreting the act of rearranging life�s genetic fabric requires an
altogether different language, and a mind-set that seeks to discover larger
patterns.
Third, language reflects the range and depth of our
experience. But our experience is being impoverished to the extent that it is
rendered artificial and prepackaged. Most of us not longer experience 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
all but vanished. Recreation and software industries are engineering and
shrink-wrapping our experience of an increasingly uniform and ugly world, and
peddling it back to us as �fun� or �information.�
Fourth, we are no longer held together by reading a common
literature or listening to the same stories. Allusions to the Bible and great
literature no long resonate because those works and unfamiliar to a growing
number of people.
Of the roughly 6,000 languages now spoken, linguists
predict that less than half are expected so survive to the year 2050. Language
is being whittled down to the dimensions of the global economy and homogenized
to accord with the �information age.� This represents a loss of cultural
information, a blurring of our capacity to understand the world and our place in
it, and a losing bet that people armed with words, metaphors, and mindset of
industry and technology can, in fact, manage the earth.
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. �The new class of
corporate chiefs, global managers, genetic engineers, and money speculators will
reduce language to the level of utility, function, and management. Evil begins
not Olney with words used with malice, but also with words that diminish people,
land, and life. The prospects for evil grow as those for language decline.
Our affinity for language makes us human. We are never
better than when we use words clearly, eloquently, and civilly. Language can
elevate thought and ennoble behavior. Abraham Lincoln�s words at Gettysburg in
1863 gave meaning to the terrible sacrifices of the Civil War. Winston
Churchill�s words inspired a nation in the dark hours of 1940. If we intent to
protect and enhance our humanity, we must first protect and enhance language and
fight anything that undermines and cheapens it.
What does this mean? First, we must restore the habit of
talking directly to each other�whatever the loss in economic efficiency. I
propose that we smash every communication device used in place of a real person,
beginning with answering machines.
Second, we can restore the habit of public reading. One of
my distinctive childhood memories is 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, keeping a large audience�including at
lease one 8-year-old boy�enthralled. No movie was ever as memorable. Further,
I propose that adults turn off the television, unplug the computer, and read
good books to their children. I know of no better or more pleasurable way to
stimulate thinking, encourage love of language, and facilitate a child�s
ability to form images.
Third, we ought to hold those who corrupt language
accountable, beginning with the advertising industry, which spends hundreds of
billions of dollars each year to sell us an unconscionable amount of often
useless, environmentally destructive, and unhealthy stuff. We should insist that
they abide by community standards of truthfulness, including full disclosure of
what products do to the environment and to those who buy them.
Fourth, we need to protect local culture from domination by
national media, markets and power. Language grows from the outside in, from
periphery to center. It is renewed in the vernacular, where human intentions
intersect places and circumstances, and by everyday acts of authentic living and
speaking. It is corrupted by contrivance, pretense, and fakery. We need to
protect the independence of local newspapers and local radio stations, as well
as those parts of our culture where memory, tradition, and devotion to place
still exist.
Finally, since language is the currency of truth, we should
defend the integrity and clarity of language as the highest priority for
schools, colleges, and universities. As teachers, we should insist on good
writing, assign readings that are well written, and restore rhetoric�the
ability to speak clearly and well�to the liberal arts curriculum. And we, too,
should be held accountable for what we say.
In terms of volume, this is surely an information age. But
in terms of understanding, wisdom, spiritual clarity, and civility, we have
entered a darker age. We are committing what C. S. Lewis once called �verbicide.�
The volume of words is inversely related to our capacity to use them well, and
to think clearly about what they mean. It is no wonder that in a dreary century
of gulags, genocide, global wars, and nuclear weapons, our use of language has
been dominated by propaganda and advertising. And what will be said in the 21st
century, as the stark realities of biotic impoverishment become apparent? Can we
summon the clarity of mind to speak the necessary words?
David W. Orr is the author of Ecological Literacy (SUNY
Press, 1992) and Earth in Mind (Island Press, 1994). This article
by Mr. Orr is from Annals of Earth (No. 3, 1999).