Ejoomuhkayshun
Ain't it wunnerful
Ah, back to the heat, grime, overcrowding, and brown air. It seems a tiny bit more tolerable after a few blessed days in the mountains. It would have been idyllic but for Mrs. FarSide’s penchant for having handymen crawling all over the house whenever we are there. I can see I need a solo flight to get the full benefit of blissful silence.
In any case, my Christmas message, written almost entirely in the Future Perfect aspect got a few folks all stirred up. This sparked several comments decrying the pitiful state of grammar among the English-speaking nations these days. Naturally, that got me all riled up.
Mom was an English teacher, you see, and drilled grammar and spelling until my fingers were calloused and swollen. Dad was a history teacher, and was more concerned with etymology. He would drill me with flashcards which forced me to look at an English word and determine the Greek or Latin root, and define it. I still haven’t forgiven him for that.
All through grade school, also known as grammar school, I had English and Spanish classes — was it every day, or three days a week? I forget now. At any rate, I can use British or American English with equal facility, and I speak Spanish with a Seville accent. Those skills and a quarter will get you a donut (dough nought, get it?).
All this set up is to launch into a diatribe on the demise of the Trivium and Quadrivium. Together, these comprise the Seven Liberal Arts, or the disciplines that shall set you free.
For centuries in the West, these were the essential skills for any educated person. The Trivium — grammar, logic and rhetoric, or reasoning with letters — allowed us to understand an argument, analyze it, and compose a response. We were meant to spend our formative years mastering the four language skills — reading, writing, listening, speaking — opening us to the world of literature, composition and oration.
In high school, we were exposed to the Quadrivium, or reasoning with numbers. Arithmetic, geometry, harmonics (music), and astronomy were intended to impart the skills necessary for measuring and quantifying the Universe and all things in it.
Taken together, these seven disciplines gave us access to the wisdom of our ancestors, and allowed us to build on them, or as Bernard of Chartres (12th c.) put it, “We are always standing on the shoulders of giants,” a sentiment echoed centuries later by Sir Isaac Newton himself.
Take away these skills and the world becomes opaque. We have no history, and without history we have no future, while the present is eternal repetition. If we don’t know the 5 forms, 4 aspects, 4 moods, 3 tenses, and 2 voices encoded in every English verb, how will we ever know the relationship of the Subject to the Object in Time? Can we describe parallel or truncated structures? Can we examine the possible, probable and unlikely in conditional statements? Can we know which actions are finished, habitual, or on-going? What about initiated, but unresolved?
Humans think in images. Whenever we want to communicate something, we first visualize the scene we want to transmit. Language is the means by which we encode, transmit and decode those images. If two people do not speak the same language, they can likely never transmit their thoughts to each other. It’s the same with digital images. You cannot open a JPEG file using a TIFF reader. The result is incoherent noise.
As one of my professors once said, civilization is a chain and if a link is broken, what came before is likely lost forever. Think of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Until the chance discovery of the Rosetta Stone, they were little more than row upon row of curious pictures — meaningless and inscrutable. The link to that chain was broken thousands of years ago. If it weren’t for Napoleon invading Egypt in 1799, we may still have no clue what those ancient people were trying to tell us.
Whenever the Bumbledicks attack a culture, their first target is always language. They degrade grammar, redefine words, change spelling. The goal is to sever us from our past and deny us the wisdom of our forebears.
The Bumbledicks destroy the means of connection between humans and insert their short-circuits, forcing all communications to become vertical, rather than horizontal — we can only understand official diktats, without the ability to disseminate ideas.
How many (ostensibly) English-speaking folks born after 1990 have any clue what thou, thee, thy, thine mean, or how to conjugate verbs with the informal you? Not many, I’ll wager, judging by the horrific grammar of the average American and their ever-shrinking vocabulary.
How many American adults could read Treasure Island without a dictionary to hand, or even know how to use the dictionary should one be available?
Native English speakers are lucky, in that their native tongue is widely used as a global de facto lingua franca. Ironically, as the world has adopted English, native speakers have increasingly lost it.
If you are of an age, you may have once learned from the McGuffey Reader, a series of books once accessible to educated 8th graders. Many American adults with college degrees would likely struggle to read them now. If you have or know a child, pass the link on to them. If you can find the original books, buy them and bequeath them to your progeny. They are likely the greatest gift one could offer these days.
Language is culture. If we intend to win the culture war, here is where we begin. If you want to join the fray in 2026, fight to get McGuffey Readers back in schools, and qualified teachers in the classrooms. The Trivium is now our greatest weapon.
Without language, all else is trivial.
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The cinematic treat du jour is another of my all-time favorite films: The Name of the Rose (1986). This is very nearly a perfect film, with story from Umberto Eco’s brilliant novel, the masterful direction of Jean-Jacques Annaud, and a host of stunning performances in every role — even Christian Slater is tolerable. I particularly enjoy Ron Perlman’s Salvatore. James Horner’s score is haunting and atmospheric. You will be transported to the 13th century, buckle up!
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You have outdone yourself on this one. Fan-damn-tastic. My mother the English and Math teacher would be with you all the way. Thank you.
I pegged you for a McGuffey man. I'm worried AI will turn us allerdings into mush brains. You should start a school