A friend was shocked when young associates didn’t know the meaning of ‘teetotaler,’ a once-common word that has largely disappeared from the language (replaced by ‘nondrinker’). There are many others like it, and not only slang. Shall, bestow, sublimity—all nearly gone.
Some words have not been replaced, and their meanings are harder to express now, while others have wan replacements (‘amid’ has become ‘in the middle of’ and ‘solicitude’ has become ‘concern’).
Americans’ vocabularies have shrunk dramatically over the last 50 years at all education levels. The language also has lost dimension, with the abandonment of words for verb tenses such as the past subjunctive (if I were), for grammatical distinctions such as subject and object (I or me, who or whom), and for spatial or temporal relationships (nigh, yonder, and whence, among others).
I can hear the response, “The language always changes.” Yes, it does. But in other eras, it got richer. With these changes, we’re getting dumber.
This decline threatens writers, the survival of great literature, and the quality of our individual thoughts. As if that’s not enough, it also assists the super-rich as our infirm democracy slides into idiocracy.
I’ll explain those connections in this newsletter and in my next edition.
A smaller, simpler language is a less capable tool. English was created from the sloppy collisions of linguistic traditions that accreted an immense vocabulary and a thicket of rules that are made be broken. Its most advanced users have played with all this complexity and breadth—Shakespeare comes to mind, with his multitudinous word choice and ingenious sentences.
Language is also a fundamental element of intelligence. Simplify it, and you confine yourself to simpler thoughts. There is a well-studied connection between how we think and the structure of the language we think in.
Americans’ verbal abilities have steadily declined, but IQ scores in nonverbal areas of intelligence have increased. That makes sense. Students and people of all ages read far less than in earlier generations, but they watch much more. Consuming videos calls on a different intelligence.
Videos are good at mimicking experience and eliciting emotions. But words convey meaning more efficiently, deliver ideas and explain reasoning more effectively, and can stimulate the imagination rather than only directing it.
Social media and its addictive videos seem to have accelerated the decline of language. AI will further accelerate this decline, and probably already has.
Reading scores for high school seniors dropped to a record low in tests reported recently by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, with a third of students below basic proficiency. (The Trump administration has all but eliminated the testing program, so we may not be bothered by such bad news again).
This decline started before the pandemic, and researchers blame online video for displacing reading. But these kids are also the first cohort to spend most of high school with AI that can read and write for them.
AI gave me an extraordinary research report to support this newsletter, which I recommend reading, both for what it says and to see how good it is.
In my next newsletter, I’ll discuss who benefits from degrading our language and thinking.
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