Word Cliff

Look at this list of words:

I, you, me, us, ugly, dumb, power, life, don’t, can’t, will, shall, powerless, are, is, won’t, aren’t, die, live, life.

If all you had were these words, and you were forbidden from using any others or even from knowing there are others available for use, imagine the kinds of conversations you could have. It isn’t hard to see that your cognitive ability, much less your very imagination will be stagnant and perhaps even regress.

It will be impossible to “see” anything not immediately describable by the contents of your word store. You will be literally literally lost, unable to break out of that mental prison and all because your vocabulary is stunted.

Now this is not a post to advocate you increase your vocabulary. No. It is a post to decry—uselessly, I’m sure—the practice in this country of outlawing words by convention. We have been convinced to accept a basket of words with the finger-wagging admonition that the use of any words not in that “safe” basket will result in proscription.

What results is the virtual certainty that no original thought is possible, at least not without paying the price and in a society in which payment—monetary or otherwise—is too high a price at whatever the price, almost no one will pay it. Those who do have their heads stuck on poles around the city’s walls as a warning.

We become suited thus to meander around the veld of our lives, “safe” in the herd. Our outlook of any danger blocked by the close view of the other sheep in the herd. We certainly can’t see the culling of the outlying sheep by wolves, and we’re too far inside the comforting milieu of society to hear the terrifying, dying bleats of those outliers.

Even those who, by dint of natural intelligence—the equivalent of a sheep born with a longer neck, perhaps—are able to see that in the distance, sheep blood is mixing with dust and terror, but their strained gushing comes out packaged and tightly bound in those limited words. Even if they were to find other words, no one around them would understand ‘those’ words and so our Cassandras’ warnings fall into  brains incapable of processing them. It then becomes only a matter of time before the sheep in the middle meet the same fate as their brutalized outlier cousins.

The ingenuity of limiting verbiage—and softly enforcing such limitations by ensuring teachers are worse every year—is that sometimes even those “special” sheep cannot, cognitively, understand what it is they’re seeing. They simply have no suitable words to think with. The very thing that differentiates humans from the lower animals, our ability to think our way out of trouble is impaired. Death results.

Many times, and here truly, is where that evil ingenuity reaches its apex: a few sheep assiduously strive to better their vocabularies, despite the pain of punishment and ostracism. They have gathered enough words and they have honed their cognitive ability. Alas, what they lack is the ability to make words connect to each other in critical ways and so they come to the wrong conclusions, warning about the wrong things if they do at all. This is like hobbling Usain Bolt at the ankles. All those powerful upper-leg muscles become ineffective because the road-meeting feet are incapable of translating potential energy to kinetic, Olympic gold winning energy.

As always, death results.