Our Language Has Changed and We Changed with It

June 17, 2012 - PRLog -- When I was a small child my mother would compare me to Lucy Van Pelt.  Maybe you remember her, she was Linus’ sister; Linus was Charlie Brown's best friend.  Lucy always had an opinion and she expressed it frequently.  While I understood that the comparison was another way of saying that children should be seen and not heard, I became fascinated with Lucy and why my mother would compare me to her instead of simply saying, be quiet.  I was 5 or 6 when I began to listen to the undercurrent of language that was spoken in my household and the world beyond.  Language was like a river, it could be shallow, deep, smooth, turbid, clear, murky, or a myriad of other things but one thing was for certain, there was always a surface meaning and there was always something going on underneath.

Why Lucy?  Well, what mother was pointing out is that I constantly analyzed people, their motives and actions and then openly commented on them.  Not a very lady like quality in a primped and curled little girl, it was particularly odious at dinner.  My father would query each one of us as to how our day was and how life in general was passing, and as we responded the conversation would become this intricate weave of jab and dodge.  My older brothers would answer with a verbal two pronged fork carefully poking my dad with the version of the truth that was least likely to expose them, keeping the other prong at a safe distance. I, being a little girl, had no explicit knowledge of what the truth was, I just knew that it was being veiled, hidden under a bright rippling surface of conversation, and that it swam quickly with the current trying to escape my father’s watchful eye.  Fascinated by this I would raise my hand to be recognized and then pipe some endearing observation like, “Daddy, did you notice “how” brother one said that he and brother two went to the pasture right after school?  Why did he sound like he was upset and look so at brother two when he said it that way?”  Conversation would pause.  My mother would affect a brighter tone and ask if Lucy charged a nickel or a dime. My father would give my brothers that “We will discuss this later,” look. Then life would go on.

There is a casual surface of language that floats across all conversation.  Generally, humanity now dances verbally with each other in a modern manner where the only touching is aimed at a base goal.  No longer are there developed steps, just twist and turns implying or denying a true connection with the conversational partner.  Maybe it was always this way and I simply think it is a recent development because I compare the age I experience to literature of the ages proceeding.  Alas, either way relationships in which conversation plunges deep into the human soul are few and far between.  This does not bode entirely evil, as an adult I have learned something profound concerning surface conversation; it can contain as much or even more truth about people than deeper more discerning intercourse, very much like water at the surface usually contains more oxygen that it does on the bottom of the pool.  Yes, there is much to be said for the shallow speech with which we move ourselves around the office, school, and home.  While, in my observation, it is almost completely void of substantial truth there is a veracity that allows for human life to remain plausibly happy.

To get to the bottom of what is shallow; humanity has a general, if not deep, good will toward each other.  Now take the proceeding sentence and replace the words, “good will” with any other phrase that fits the human condition: apathy, love, hatred, hopefulness, desire for success, despair, etc… and the sentence works just as well.  This general attitude toward each other is the origin of the shallowness of our speech.  Is it ok if I quote the Bible here?  “…out of the abundance of his heart his mouth speaks.” Luke 6:45   Go read the rest of the verse; it’s quite instructive.  Whether or not ages past were different this generation has whatever the opposite of “abundance” is in their heart toward man.  There is no depth of feeling therefore there is no depth of meaning in speech.  The very essence of the nature of man is to speak in a manner that covers, not reveals him.  We show ourselves slowly to those we get to know, peeling back our layers, (either because they stink like an onions layers or because underneath we know that in the moonlight we are an ogre) carefully, poised to verbally run or attack at any sign of danger.  Shallowness is the protective coating worn by modern man, his armor so to speak.  Notice I did not use the word politeness, no that would only be correct for the generations preceding ours; we are not polite, we are shallow.

Not to say that there is no depth of speech left in us.  No, humanity is not lost yet; there is an inner-longing in all men to be fully revealed, to know and be deeply connected with another being.  We inarticulately refer to this desire as love.  Human connection is as related to speech as bone is to marrow.   So, why all of the shallowness?  I have a thousand theories on this but in an effort to be brief (not shallow) I will only espouse a few.  The shift of language itself, the refocusing of education, the misdirection of man’s responsibility toward man… Well, this is an essay not a book so I better just touch on those.  For humanity to be expressed there must be language, throughout all ages and all cultures man strives to perfect language, constantly reaching within to form sounds into patterns that reveal the thoughts, feelings, and desires of his heart; as the world shrinks, so does the delicate mystery of dialect.  Within each culture, indeed within the minutest subsections of cultures there are nuisances of thought and feeling that are expressed uniquely.  As these idioms become manifest to us, they form new realizations within us in which we identify with the individual or group where we encountered the exposure.  There is in this age an ugly destruction of these fragile colloquialisms.  Entire swaths of humanity adopt phrases with little or no meaning and employ them broadly thus rendering them insignificant.  There is nothing to be gleaned from another human soul when exchanging a whispered, “You’re hot.”

So we train our minds in an educational system that views vocabulary, not as the base with which we will know ourselves and our universe, but rather as a determination of how well we will do on a college entrance examination.  I believe that the very way our modern educational system studies language produces an attitude that promotes shallowness.  Words are an emotional experience!  However, we live in a society that teaches written and verbal minimalism.  We teach the next generation to speak and write in sound bites thus discouraging the serendipity of speech that comes from musing.  So, we produce an age that is inarticulate, there is no less longing within the human soul, just less ability to define and express it.  Imagine using social conditioning to train several generations of Birds of Paradise not to perform their bizarre and highly individualistic mating rituals.  The desire to mate remains but the beauty and expression is gone.  They have become shallow.  My favorite example of man rising to his genius to overcome this broad social condition is the rapper Eminem.  What a humble origin did this icon of language ascend from and yet he is a master of idiomatic rhetoric.  Pure volcanos of human condition erupt lyrically from his soul.

This lack of expression shrinks the soul, the mind is limited in its ability to describe thought, the emotions are stunted by the compressed meaningless jargon, and the will is rendered useless because it is language that empowers us.  I await a coming revolution, a rise in power of some Olympians of speech.  -  Shel St Clair