Words! Words! Words!

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"All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down." - Friedrich Nietzsche

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.” - William Shakespeare.

What would life be like if we could not see to read; or for that matter, read to see? One of the famous quotes from the Willy Russell film, 'Educating Rita', a classic tale of the power of reading to broaden the mind and answer an intrinsic desire to self-improve, was, "Wouldn't you die without Mahler?" Or in Mendelssohn's case, a 'Song without words'! Music transcends expression in puny words, yet what else is there in which to express? There is no critical thinking without thought. And there is no thought without words.

Rita's sophisticated female friend and exemplar said the words. The infatuation was short lived. Even with Mahler, life proved unbearable for her. Death from an overdose shattered Rita's recently created illusions. Is there a parallel with reading literature? I can't really imagine life without it. Without music and books in fact, would life be worth living?

The Victorians had Samuel Smiles' 'Self Help'. We had Willy Russell's 'Educating Rita', the working class girl from Liverpool who wanted to break free and emulate a different class, a different social milieu. To be a "stuuudent", to be able to string words together in a clever way. To be 'well read' and familiar with a whole body of ideas and 'literature'. 

Rita's journey was not only into the mind of William Blake, it was into her own perceptions and discoveries and the paradox of educational objectives. Ambitious dreams like the horizon and the mirage, are illusionary they can never be reached. Yet it is the journey that matters not necessarily the destination. We live in a time of speed, when the journey is sacrificed for a destination, which upon arrival may prove disappointing.

Those that possessed what she yearned for, were in reality no happier or self-fulfilled. Yet it is still a search everyone makes in one form or another, and some are lucky enough to discover a real place or oasis. Virgil led Dante level by level into the depths of the inferno before he could ascend out of it. (Whilst I think of it, I always turn the sound off when the adverts come on)

I like Rita, always admired those who could read and write; those that could express themselves eloquently with the necessary intellectual and linguistic powers; the facility to remember facts and spell accurately. In short 'clever' people who put me to shame - and still do.

'Spell' - now there's an interesting word! Not for nothing 'the pen is mightier than the sword'. Words, spoken and written, do indeed have magical power and they are perhaps the only distinctive feature of the human animal - the ability to express thoughts, feelings and emotions, to communicate them by drawing on an almost limitless abstract code.

Words can indeed cast a spell, entrance and inspire. There is a mystical element to them. Not without reason John begins his Gospel with, "In the beginning was the word. And the word was with God. And the word was God." Without words, the idea of God - or anything else - could not exist, even if the object itself remains mysterious and indefinable.

It is a hundred years since Sir Herbert Warren suggested, "The soul of a people is expressed in its language." Some may doubt the existence of 'soul' individually and corporately in a materialist age and culture, but if true, to trace the development of language is also to trace the development of soul.

Words and their representation have a long but not that long history. Considering our ancestors have been around for perhaps a million years, even the most ancient writing pales into insignificance. The Sumerian archaic writing and Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest true writing systems, emerging around three and a half thousand years BC. Coherent texts come about a thousand years later. 

To the Greeks and Romans we owe the first philosophical texts that determined thought throughout the medieval period, even if the civilizations that spawned them fell into decay. Without words and writing in ancient Greek and Latin, the profound reasoning of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cato, Seneca, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, to name but a few, would have disappeared into oblivion.

The European 'Renaissance' saw the re-emergence of these and the gradual transition, modification or abandonment of them as knowledge increased. The Platonist, the Neo-Platonists, the Renaissance natural philosophers, the nineteenth century 'scientists'., the 20th century nihilists.

Not until John Locke (1632 - 1704) came along was language itself submitted to minute examination, as a way of revealing the human mind. In his famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) he discusses how words describe simple and compound ideas, things both solid and ethereal. That mental thought depends on a vocabulary, without which reasoning is impossible; it would remain an inchoate mixture of feelings without expression.

Locke is famous for his idea of the mind at birth as a 'blank slate' or tabula rasa, that experience and formal instruction - what we refer to as 'education' - leaves it mark upon. "No man's knowledge can go beyond his experience," he said. Also, "Education begins the gentleman but reading, good company and reflection finishes him." In more recent times Wittgenstein analysed language and the process of thinking by distinguishing between facts from non-facts. Famously he took Locke's idea further by stating:  "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."   

I cannot remember when I learned to read, or how. I can remember no lessons in reading, though presumably I had them. In memory, the process predates the skill to a time when only odd moments survive. Perhaps my earliest memory is being seated on a bedroom window-cill, presumably naked after a bath, and being treated with Johnson's baby talc with that heavenly perfume. The product has received a bad press but I shall always be an addict.

Pronouncing words and reading came easier it seems than writing and spelling. It is a natural process of imitation, facilitated by a neural configuration that millions of years of evolution has made possible. All five senses of touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing, find their way to the brain, to be stored for as long as life continues, notwithstanding trauma or decline with old age. All animals copy from birth, and humans with their peculiar talent for speech, are no exception.

People from my past! (Sorry image won't load for some reason)

At around seven or eight I came home from school with a list of words to commit to memory, both for their meaning and application. Out of all those, only one sticks in the memory and caused me problems, that word was 'beautiful' - a word with only one vowel missing. My sister I remember played the part of teacher and I have never forgotten how to spell it since, though many other words still stump me, particularly those with 'ie' and double letters. One such was 'Mediterranean' that my emotional brother worked himself into a frenzy over, because I refused his method of spelling it correctly. Without his method, my brain has somehow mastered it, it seems.

The first word or phrase I remember reading by myself was 'The End'. The words appeared appropriately enough at the end of every film and programme that appeared on the novel machine called the 'television', to which all that possessed one, were glued to in the 1950's. Whenever "The End" appeared I would announce it, as if I had achieved something great, to the adults' laughter and applause, which I suppose encouraged me.

To learn the end before I had hardly begun, was I suppose a tad ironic. Nor did I have any conception of how it drew on much more emotive thinking. "My end is my beginning", was coined it is said by the rather tragic Mary Queen of Scots ("En ma Fin gît mon Commencement...") and reused by T. S. Eliot, renowned for his 'Wasteland' (1922).  Eliot rather summed up the sense of nihilistic pessimism and loss of faith that pervaded intellectual society in the post war period, informed by the scientific discoveries and theories from the preceding Century. It also chimed with the post Hiroshima world, labouring under the atomic cloud. Whatever Eliot meant, was very different to Queen Mary's understanding.  She believed in a life after death. Post-Nietzsche, 'God was dead'.

For Nietzsche, language as an instrument of truth was a futile pursuit. “A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist." 

Yet without language how would any truth be discovered or communicated? Perhaps the only truthful 'languages' are the abstract ones found in maths and chemistry by which the whole universe turns. But we should never forget how words can be the instrument of deceit, evil and control. Words themselves are innocent; how they are used and manipulated carry great emotional power. They are the instrument of demagogy as well as philosophy. We currently have Covid-19 to prove it.

Truth and lies have to be distinguished if humanity is not to railroaded to destruction, both personally and societally. Jordan Peterson is the latest iteration of the popular Western Philosopher offering a solution to man's innate soul searching, proving what an unmet thirst there is for a form of practical and spiritual guidance in an essentially agnostic and irreligious age. Sadly the oracle is not detached from, or unsusceptible to, the demons of which he speaks.

It is estimated there are at least six and a half thousand distinct languages in the world and 'English' is just one of them. How insular and parochial is the English speaker? Every language has a history of its own and English of course is no exception.  It is a mongrel accretion words and grammar reflecting all the great movements of people and cultures that continues to this day. 

To all the early tribal Celtic dialects was overlaid Roman Latin. Then during the sixth to tenth Centuries came the admixtures of German, Danish and Norwegian as invasion of the East coast advanced West. By the time of the Norman invasion in 1066 an Anglo-Saxon tongue predominated but was made subservient in Royal and administrative circles to early French. Gradually from the time of Chaucer (c. 1390) we see an identifiable 'middle' English circulating in written form, made more common by the printing press, introduced to England from Germany by William Caxton in the 1470's. 

From that time on, English achieved pre eminence at Court and market place, whilst still leaning heavily on Latin in official legal and international circles. Indeed, fluency in Latin still remained one of the distinguishing features of the well-educated renaissance man. Yet the grammar of the Elizabethan 'Grammar School', the sort that Shakespeare attended, was not of the native tongue but of Roman and Greek! The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an unprecedented flowering of literature and poetry in parallel with all the advances in science, technology and discovery of the world, by which English was spread. Empire and global trade in turn introduced more exotic words into the vocabulary, as indeed immigration has in the last century. 

By 1755, Samuel Johnson could claim to have produced the first comprehensive 'dictionary' of words and their meanings despite others in the preceding hundred and fifty years. The compilation took Johnson at least seven years and on publication consisted of  42,773-words. Today the Oxford English Dictionary contains over 220,000 words including nearly 50,000 that are obsolete.

I have just read a book on genius by Russell Brain (1895 - 1966). Besides writing the standard work on nervous diseases and other medical achievements he became a Quaker in 1931, giving the 1944 Swarthmore Lecture on ‘Man, society and religion’, in which he stressed the importance of a social conscience. He died the year I ended my secondary education (without any distinction). I didn't have his brains! Reading it again all seems fresh and new and nothing is remembered. How much of what we read is remembered let alone recalled? He devotes six chapters to Johnson, renowned in his day for his one-liners but not universally liked. Sharp words like arrows cannot be recalled and sometimes leave wounds that will not heal.

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714 - 1799) who once entertained Johnson at his Scottish seat but subsequently refused to shake hands with him, is quoted as saying, "Dr Johnson was the most invidious malignant and man I have ever known...and who in private conversation was ready to cavil at and contradict everything that was said"! Clearly Johnson was better at speaking words than listening to them.

Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784)

Brain's book is full of names past and then present considered in some way genius. Like Brain himself (and the organ he was named after) they have vanished from the earth, leaving behind in varying degrees, the product of their intellect and skill. It is a salutary lesson for us all on the ultimate transience of human personality, self awareness and creativity and the futility of achievement and reputation.

The English language that rang in my ears, was heavily influenced by that 'Middle English'. The language and dialect of the rural west country was far closer to Tudor England than that heard on the BBC - the so called 'received pronunciation'. My grandfather had a broader accent than my father, and my father than me. My son has virtually none. It is a family microcosm of a national trend. Sadly, strong regional dialects for the last Century at least, have acted as a barrier to social advancement.

Many words and phrases in common use came from a much earlier period as did the broad dialect. For example, "How bist thee?" for "How are you?" could be heard frequently at the local market where farmers met on a regular basis. 'Bist' is no longer listed as an English word, though it is in Middle English, originating from High German. So we must assume it arrived in Somerset with the tide of Saxons who pushed the preceding Celts and their largely oral culture, ever further west, the remnants of which can still be detected despite the extinction of a race and its beliefs.

Another clue as to the German or Anglo Saxon connection is the substitution of 'v' for 'f'. As in "Whirr be she vrom?" (Where is she from?) and "vur a vorraner" (for a forreigner). 'Father', it might be worth noting, is 'Vater' in German. The Somerset dialect also loves to abbreviate, dropping its 'h's" and 'd's' and 'g's', such as 'iz' and 'erz' (for his and her's), 'ant' (for 'have not') 'Ark a ee' (Hark at he/Listen to him) and so on. The use of old English 'thee' and 'thou' in place of 'you' is also a familiar feature, all within the context of a distinctive brogue. (Credit Roger Evans) These second person singular pronouns were in fact a distinguishing feature of 17th C. Quakerism beside a distinctive dress, habit and belief system.

Although the Somerset dialect has a direct pedigree from the language of the Anglo-Saxon Wessex Court, up until the eleventh century and pronunciation accurately reflects it, in more modern times it has carried with it pejorative social associations. The pronunciation of the Royal Court and educated elite was influenced by both Latin and French. Regional accents suggested an absence of both and by extension, education and manners. 

Exceptions such as Francis Drake who came from Tavistock in Devon and Walter Raleigh both exhibited the Devonshire dialect, and Henry VIII it is said had a wrestler who refused to speak anything but Cornish in Court. Cornish still remains a separate Celtic language in its own right, though largely obsolete. 

We must thank the BBC for projecting an approved pronunciation to which all other regional ones were subservient. There is no doubt that an approved accent, grammar and vocabulary were throughout the 19th and 20th Century, a necessary factor in social and educational advancement, and probably still are.

Reading, writing and speaking are therefore inextricably linked aspects of literacy and communication. The verbal and printed environments to which children are subjected, indelibly influences them for the rest of their lives. The developing brain has a particular affinity to learning psycho-motor skills but perhaps it is never too late to catch up, though memorising may become more problematic with advancing years. Locke's 'blank slate' may have useful application to education but we also need to appreciate the power of genius and those imprinted inexplicable innate facilities.

I believe as a child I could read quite well at a relatively early age although I was never emotionally or practicably attracted to it, which I very much regret. Pages of print repelled me. Even into my teens I would 'read' books by reviewing the illustrations rather than consuming the words. Not until my late teens/twenties did I start serious reading on my own initiative. Memorising facts sufficient to pass General Certificate and later professional examinations was achieved, but with it a mental barrier that always frustrated ambition that probably was socially inculcated. How 'Rita' resonates!

There is probably no greater asset to the fulfilled life, than a good memory of detail, though we should always be wary of Dr Gradgrind's advice in Dickens' book 'Hard Times': "Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them." It is a rhetorical warning on the psychological  dangers of an education devoid of aesthetic and emotional content that distinguishes the machine from the man. The new industrial world of the 19th Century, in which Dickens found himself and about which he wrote with such amazing dexterity, was an era in which humans had to adapt to a new reality: namely in many instances, for all intents and purposes, they were merely the necessary adjunct to the machine, and their lives regulated by it.

I was born into a Calvinist Christian family where only one book - in reality an anthology of books - was considered expedient. This was the Bible, or as we were taught 'The Word of God' in comparison with which, all other books paled into insignificance.  This it should be said, was not typical of an English 1950's up-bringing, and rendered me different from most other children within the community and at school and had unavoidable social and psychological consequences, which by and large were not onerous and which I took in my stride. It meant however that mixing with my peers also involved a certain distancing from them and ensured that social integration was always problematic. 

At seven or eight I was able to recite all the 'books' of the Bible and many of 'chunks' of the text as well. A well known aphorism attributed to Aristotle was, “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” was adopted by the Catholic Church. With an unfolding picture of abuse, it now has far darker overtones but the principle still stands. Mine was a non-conformist upbringing antipathetic to formal religion and to political systems based on the scriptural injunction of "Come ye out from amongst them and be ye separate" (2 Cor. 6:17) 

My father was a pacifist. He strictly applied the Christian injunction, "Thou shalt not kill." Although eschewing politics, he clearly had leanings towards Socialism. He read the Daily Herald! To be accepted as a 'Conscientious Objector' during the Second WW he had to face a statutory tribunal. When asked by the judge what he would do if the Germans invaded he replied, "I should have no alternative but to submit." The local 'Evening Post' reported it as, "I would chase them with a stick." As a growing child I might have much preferred a soldier father. Perhaps that was my cowardice. Little did I know his cousin had won the MC as a Major in Burma. Now I wonder who was the braver.

These things have a lasting effect and have probably, in ways deeper than I realise, coloured my view of the world. Idealism gave way to scepticism, gave way to suspicion, gave way to disbelief, in much that is promulgated by government as truth, the 'Covid Pandemic' being but the latest example on so many levels.

Words! Words! Words! Today we are drowning in words both spoken and written. The ideas enunciated by them compete in a Darwinian sort of way for survival in the mediums in which they exist. Newspapers, magazines, learned journals, advertisements, radio, television and of course the Internet. Government now spends vast sums of ultimately our money, on trying to make us think the way it wants us to. 

Covid is a case in point and if mask wearing and other strange behaviours are to go by, it has been incredibly successful. Many years have passed since Vance Packard published 'The Hidden Persuaders' about the American advertising industry, yet still people are largely unaware of how they are manipulated by it and by Government applying the dark arts. That is the very real danger facing us now.

In many ways our ancestors lived a much simpler intellectual life. Apart from an educated elite, largely situated in the Catholic Church, words were exchanged verbally and the written word did not impinge significantly. Writing was largely the province of the scribe living an hermitage existence in a religious foundation. Reading was a specialism accrued by a tiny proportion of the population. Not until the Reformation did the principal book - the Bible - become widely available in the native tongue followed by an explosion in religious and philosophical texts. Pamphlets of a political and religious nature appear in their thousands during the 16th and 17th Centuries, and with it the emergence of poetry and prose, exemplified of course by people like William Shakespeare and many more.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:English_Renaissance_dramatists

From the 18th Century onwards we see the emergence of new treatment of printed words - the novel. In a way it is a throwback to an ancient tradition of oral story telling that has deep roots in all cultures. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storytelling) In Western society documents such as Beowulf probably represent just a sample of a lost tradition of oral history passed from father to son, particularly in a priestly caste, probably hawked around the country by troubadours or travelling story tellers. The modern novel allows the reader to enter the mind of the author and of the real or imaginary world there created. 

The novel uses words to tell a story. It built upon the play and depended on the printing press, the book binder, the publisher and the book shop. Religious themes developed into an exposition of life and relationship, though a moral undercurrent was never far from the surface.

John Bunyan told the allegorical story of 'Pilgrim's Progress'. (1678) Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe appeared in 1716. The satirist Jonathan Swift's 'Gulliver's Travels' in 1726. No doubt to the 18th Century popular mind, these was Jules Verne to the 19th and Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke were to the 20th. The imagination of the writer took the reader into unknown and exotic territory providing escapism from the banal, the hum drum and the routine.

The 18th Century 'Enlightenment' was accompanied by a word explosion in poetry and prose to which is attached the term 'Romanticism'. Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelly, Southey, Wordsworth, the more notable of many, brought passion and romance into the living room.  Jane Austin, George Elliot, Elizabeth Barratt Browning, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, just a few of the people who ignited the Victorian imagination and social conscience. Before film, wireless, television or internet, especially where access to theatre and music hall was unavailable, only church, chapel, bible and books, and to an increasing extent newspapers and periodicals, provided mental stimulation. Nor can the emancipatory consequences for women be overlooked.

Everything depended on literacy both to write and read. Between 1700 and 1900 literacy rates roughly doubled in men from 50% to 100% and in women the increase was even more dramatic from less than 20%. (See: https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/education-in-victorian-england/#:~:text=There%20was%20a%20drastic%20increase,spikes%20in%20the%2019th%20century. ) There now seems evidence that since the 1980's there may have been a reverse trend of declining IQ's (See below) put down to a decrease in literacy and book reading, as other technological devices, such as television and computers, where skills other than reading, take their place.

As I have said, there was something of an ambivalent attitude to learning and the part played by books in it. Everything was viewed in the context of an invisible spiritual war for the soul of man; between God and the Devil. The Bible as the 'Word of God' was the ultimate litmus test of all things cultural. Wireless and television were banned from the house as were infernal record players. They were the very instruments of the Devil to ensnare and seduce the unwary.

Books and literature were similarly judged. Comics were largely banned but I sometimes managed to evade the censor. I was allowed 'Look and Learn' as more educational than the guilty pleasure of the 'Beano' or 'Dandy'. My sister on leaving school worked in a large Bristol bookshop and would bring books home, sometimes reading them out loud. Sadly this did not get me hooked on reading them myself.

The reality - A culture virtually exterminated:

Native Americans of the Blackfoot tribe in Glacier National Park, Montana

Circa 1913, by Ronald W. Reed Contributed by C. Talavera

Christmas always brought me various annuals and cowboy books which from about five to ten was my chief obsession. The nineteen fifties was an era of television 'western', in which Hollywood projected a particular sort of American culture and history, that bore only passing likeness to the real thing. It was essentially a nostalgic reworking of a desperate and vicious process of colonisation and invasion into an imaginary fight between good and evil; law and order over chaos; the moral ascendancy of the heroic star. It might have been poppycock but its reach was global and effective. A whole generation was brought up to see America in that positive light that was hardly representative of the reality. It is hard now to recall how in the desperate state of post-war Britain, the United States was a shining light of prosperity and undreamed of convenience. It was the model the rest of the world aspired to.

The very first story that seems to have completely captured my imagination was one hiding in the leaves of a children's story book called 'Cat's Cottage'. Such was my addiction to it, no one could enter the house without my pleading they read it to me.  Why it should have held such power over me is now hard to say, but I assume it was the fact that by an act of kindness the awful fate of a mouse was avoided. 

The mouse finds itself at a cottage in the woods where mouse tails hung rattling in the wind to dry.  A sign read, "Into the shed for the skinner. Into the pot for the dinner." At every stage, "the little mouse trembled". However as luck would have it, Mrs Cat had a mouse hair in her eye, which the mouse deftly removed with the tip of his tail, thus securing his freedom from the fate that would have awaited him. Empathy for the oppressed and outrage at cruelty and injustice are abiding emotions that in embryo were evoked by the drama of 'Cat's Cottage' I imagine.

So my exposure to literature and ideas was I suppose limited largely to the apocryphal stories from the Bible, hammered home several times a week. This I believe was not necessarily such a bad thing, implanting as they did a basic sort of morality - the notion of a divine order that rewarded goodness and punished evil, as if the two could easily be distinguished. The progressive evolution of the divine character from one of jealous retribution, to that of the loving God of all mankind, Jew and Gentile.  The continuity of human sin, of punishment averted (it's back to 'Cat's Cottage' folks!) and forgiveness through the sacrifice of the divine Christ, acted not only as a psychological backdrop, but a personally interacting reality. How could a small child challenge the imponderable and irrational concepts of original sin and redemption through faith, or how the trinity actually worked, where one inseparable part could die to assuage the wrath of the other, whilst a third could invisibly intercede and intervene in human affairs?

So where would we be without an alphabet to make words, and from words to make sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books? Without words how would humans express ideas, share experiences, extend the borders of knowledge and imagination through literature, poetry and philosophy besides the natural sciences? We look back through time to the ancient Greeks and Romans, through the medieval period and renaissance. Then our own great thinkers, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Lyell, Faraday, Darwin and on into the scientific age in which man gained unprecedented insight into the macro and micro universe and unprecedented power over it as well. Once all thought and expression was subject to Divine revelation whether accurate or not. Now man discovers and decides for himself and religious belief cowers in awe.

Man has come of age but like the child growing up may not like what he finds. There is happiness in innocence. But growing up means accommodating to the real world, of adjusting to it. To refuse to do so results in a naïve view of the world, a tendency to be susceptible to any argument or position, "reeds, shaken by the wind". Modern man may be more sophisticated, pampered, protected and informed than ever before but he also appears lost, lonely and purposeless. Nietzsche may have stripped philosophy of all remnants of sentimentality and religious superstition but his end was insanity. His powers of reason could not protect him from himself.

In growing up in those first ten or fifteen years I naturally imbibed the words and culture that surrounded me, as does every child, the classical 'blank slate'. Beside my own family consisting traditionally parents and four siblings, besides two grandparents living nearby, two other families had a significant impact. All three were deeply embedded in the local economy, each distinctive in its own way. It was a world of families holding their own running local businesses and enterprises. Self sufficient and interdependent.

  

Are people getting stupider?

Guy Cancel

tSprrAfungfumsotonsorse 1dl  · 

The effect of Flynn by its designer's name prevailed until 1960. Its principle is that the average Intellectual Quotient (IQ) keeps increasing in the population. Since the 1980 s, cognitive scientists seem to share the finding of a reversal of the Flynn effect, and a decline in average IQ.

The thesis is still being discussed and many studies have been underway for nearly forty years without resolving the debate. It seems that the level of intelligence measured by IQ testing is decreasing in the most developed countries, and that a multitude of factors can be the cause of it.

To this very challenged decline in the average level of intelligence is added to the impoverishment of language. There are numerous studies that demonstrate the narrowing of the lexical field and a depletion of the language. It's not just about the diminution of vocabulary used, but also about the subtleties of the language which allow for the elaboration and formulation of complex thinking.

The gradual disappearance of times (subjunctive, simple past, imperfect, shapes composed of the future, past participates...) gives rise to a thought to the present, limited to the moment, unable to projections in time. The generalization of tutoiement, the disappearance of capital letters and punctuation are all deadly blows to the subtlety of expression. Removing the word ′′ miss ′′ is not only waiving the aesthetics of a word, but also promoting the idea that between a little girl and a woman there is nothing.

Fewer words and fewer conjugated verbs is less ability to express emotions and less ability to elaborate a thought.

Studies have shown that some of the violence in the public and private sphere comes directly from the inability to put words on emotions.

Without words to build a reasoning Edgar Morin's intricate thought is hindered, made impossible. The poorer the language, the less the thought exists.

History is full of examples and the writings are numerous by Georges Orwell in 1984 at Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 who relate how dictatorships of all obediences hinder thought by reducing and twisting the number and meaning of words There is no critical thinking without thought. And there is no thought without words. How to build mortgage-deductive thinking without mastery of conditional? How to envisage the future without conjugation to the future? How to apprehend a temporality, a succession of elements in time, whether passed or forth, and their relative duration, without a language that differentiates what could have been, what was, what is, what could happen, and what will be after what could happen? If a rallying cry were to be heard today, it would be the one directed to parents and teachers: talk, read and write your children, your students, your students.

Teach and practice language in its most varied forms, even if it seems complicated, especially if it's complicated. Because in this effort lies freedom. Those who explain the length of time to simplify spelling, purge the tongue of its ′′ flaws ", abolish genres, times, nuances, all that creates complexity are the graves of the human mind. He is no freedom without demands. He is no beauty without the thought of beauty.

Christophe Clavé.