Timothy Birdnow

Anyone remember Newspeak? That was the "updating" of language by the state in Orwell's 1984 to make thinking politically incorrect things, well, unthinkable.

How do you do that? You eliminate words, for one thing. Well, guess what?

We are being stripped down to the bare bones of our language and no doubt at some point the Ruling Class will then rebuild our language in a way far more pleasing to themselves.

The internet has much to do with it. Most people online use limited vocabularies, and this in return makes the viewers less labial, or less verbal anyway (maybe labial isn't the best word, but I want to show people how it's done).

I won't go into methodology; theirs seems adequate and the article I linked goes into that in detail. As they authors mention, the total OUTPUT of words has probably not declined much but the different words used has declined - the vocabulary.

We see this all the time with young people who lack the verbal skills to express themselves. It is hardly surprising; they live in bubbles with limited human contact and control of what they see and hear and learn. One empty mind preaches to another. Everything gets dumbed down, and when they don't know a word they immediately have access to technology that gives them the definition and they can just move on and forget it. In bygone days we used dictionaries, and the chore of having to look something up cemented it in our memories.

Of course this also speaks to our educational system, which is capable of graduating kids with fourth grade vocabularies. The schools and universities no longer make it their mission to teach anything beyond remedial reading.

So a college kid needs to write a paper on Shakespeare. What does he do? He doesn't READ Shakespeare he goes on line and gets a youtube tutorial on the Bard. Basically he doesn't learn anything, he just gets the information he can parrot back in a paper and that's that.

As our populace slides ever deeper into silence and mediocrity we wonder why we have so many kids now all on board with socialism/communism. They haven't a clue about anything to do with it but think it somehow "fair" because their professors or teachers said it was. They can't read The Little Black Book of Communism because they don't understand most words. Their profs speak in baby talk to them.

At a certain point any culture will stop functioning if the thing that holds people together most - their language - deteriorates past a certain point. It is the thread that binds us all. Without it and we become - something else.

The difference between Man and the animals is language. Animals communicate in a basic way, and some even have a sort of language, one they are born to understand (like chipmonks) but these non-human languages are limited to basics, lie calls about predators or food or water sources; complex concepts elude the minds of most animals and that because they lack the language skils that we possess. While some of that is biological - we have Brocca's Area and wernecke's Area, for instance, in our brains and they do not - we also have a rich language with many different words to describe complex concepts and the memory storage capacity to remember those words.

The fewer words people possess the more likely we are to fall back on the reptilian and limbic systems, the animal portions of our brains. Losing our words literally turns us to savages.

The Neocortex has nothing to work with if it has no words. And of the triune brain the neocortex is the one that makes us higher than the animals. We do not function primarily on fears or pleasures but on reason, logic, long term planning. But it can't engage if it can't speak.

So this dumbing down (literally) of the public is a very bad thing indeed. It's how we lose civilization.

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