Are You Fluent in English?

On Generational Language Loss

Does the Noun Verb in the Woods?

Kids ask the most interesting questions, and for the most unexpected reasons. A few years ago I had occasion to be hiking in the woods with one, and was asked:

“Do you think we’ll see a pope out here?”

Great joke. Made me laugh.

So imagine my shock when she reacted with surprise and hurt.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’ve never seen one.”

“What, the Pope? He’s on TV all the time. Big hat. Speaks Italian.”

“What? Why do people always talk about him shitting in the woods?”

I blinked a few long blinks, and got a sinking feeling in my gut.

You see, this “kid” was north of twenty years old. She was intelligent, graduated high school with honors from a well-regarded school district, was from a middle-class house, with two well-educated and well-cultured parents, and yet here she was, an adult of good background...

...and she didn’t know English.

We sat down on a log and I explained how that figure of speech developed.

The Pope, I pontificated, is the high priest of the Catholic church, and all the other priests report to him. He’s also the king (effectively) of a little country the size of a city-inside of Italy (“City-State” did not compute). So when you ask “Is the Pope Catholic?” You’re using mockery to answer “yes” to a question you consider to have an answer that is just as obviously "yes.”

Now, bears—the big animals, not the gay cohort—live in the woods, and they consequently must defecate there. Therefore, “Does a bear shit in the woods?” is a similar sort of mocking affirmation.

Then, to ask if the Pope shits in the woods, you’re adding a layer of ironic fun to the matter by intentionally mixing metaphors in a way that sounds accidental. It’s a kind of play—but if the person you’re playing with doesn’t share the entire context, they don’t hear it as play, they just do what she had done:

Take the bare words, read the top layer of emotional sense, and conclude “There must be some creature called ‘pope’ that I haven’t ever been taught about, and everyone else knows about it, and it lives in the woods.”

You’re a Complete Idiom

As she and I sat there were talking, I had a flashback to my one-time job at an immigration holding facility where I was working in the ESL program, and I had to explain to one of the internees—who spoke what sounded like perfect English—what it meant to be “up a tree without a paddle.”

When you have a command of grammar and vocabulary, but not metaphor, you can navigate in a land where this language is spoken, but you aren’t fluent in the language. Language isn’t just a series of cryptograms representing ideas, it’s made up of metaphors and idioms, all of which either are small stories or allude to well-known stories.

Stories are how humans process information. Inert matter doesn’t grab our attention or stick in our minds. “The sky is black” is not interesting. “The sky is black because the sun is not up,” on the other hand, gives us a story—that is, it contains cause and effect which results in understanding.

Consider “Up a tree without a ladder.” It describes a situation, but it also implies a story. You got into this precarious position somehow, and there was some kind of oversight or misjudgment or sabotage along the way.

Or consider what you mean when you call someone a “piece of work.” It’s not, as the kids in my elementary school assumed, a euphemism for “piece of shit.” It is, instead, a quotation from Hamlet’s ironic musing about the grandeur and contemptibility of the human condition:

“What a piece of work is a man,
How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty,
In form and moving how express and admirable,
In action how like an Angel,
In apprehension how like a god,
The beauty of the world,
The paragon of animals.
And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Man delights not me;”

In other words, when you call someone a “piece of work” you are acknowledging their grandeur and simultaneously declaring it tiresome or contemptible; you’re damning them with great praise. And this is why “That’s guy’s a real piece of work,” comes out not in rage, but in bemusement and/or disgust.

And everyone above a certain age knows this, because we all were forced to read Hamlet in high school.

Stories and Metaphor

The stories in our culture form one of the baselines of our language because English culture (and thus American, from which it is derived) is fundamentally rooted in literature and the trades. Our sayings, allusions, and other figures of speech are rooted in our drama (such as the example above), our contact with the physical world (“I have too many irons in the fire” comes from blacksmithing), and our myths (someone might have “the patience of Job,” or hear the “siren’s song”, or talk about their “prodigal son”).

But it’s not just our language that these things shape. The consumption of stories-as-stories from an early age teaches us how to think about things. Yes, stories contain exemplars of heroism and other virtues, but that is not where the real action is.

The real action is in the deeper metaphorical levels of the stories, the ones we pick up without ever having them explained to us; the ones we may not even be aware of ourselves. We learn to understand heroic sacrifice as worthwhile from stories like Star Wars, the Illiad, or the Gospels. We learn to value stalwartness in the face of extortion from tales of martyrs like the biblical Daniel or the real-life Boenhoffer. Robin Hood and King Arthur both exemplify the willingness to fight for justice. Sir Gawain and Philip Marlowe show the valor of walking through pain and darkness to defend the weak. Tyler Durden and Alex de Large show the potency of masculinity and the dangers in repressing it (or indulging it the wrong way). Scrooge shows the crippling horror of regret and the healing power of generosity. And, at base, all heroic tales (i.e. those concerned with the journey of a single character) explore the cycle of life: growth, overcoming, love, maturity, death, mourning, and generational turning.

When we first encounter such stories we don’t know that’s what we’re getting out of them, but we acquire such ideas all the same. It is how we transmit our understanding of how to be human from one generation to another: how to love, how to laugh, how to strive, how to live, and how to die.

It doesn’t matter whether we grow up to reject those values or accept them—most of us will do some of each. What matters is that without such stories, there is no culture. Without culture, the individual must make up all of human life from scratch, having no access to the accumulated experiences of other humans who have gone before.

Of Babies and Bathwater

If you were an evil overlord, what would be the most effective, subtle way to break your enemy’s culture?

How about this:

Take away its stories.

If you’re a ham-fisted conqueror, you’ll censor or ban the books and tales from which everyone derives their common language. The problem with this is that when something is forbidden, it’s going to seem sexy to at least some part of the population, and that part is usually quite charismatic and highly motivated. Pornography, heresy (of whatever sort), tradecraft, weapons manufacture, drugs, and dangerous ideas all spread further and faster and with greater efficacy when they’re banned. The more locked down a culture is, the more pockets of high-energy dissent builds up, and the more unstable it becomes in the long term.

It’s far more effective to make essential knowledge uninteresting. And the best way to do this is to pursue a two-pronged strategy: make everything available, and make everything that’s valuable either shameful or obligatory (or, even better, both).

Starting in the 1970s, the foundations of our language began to follow that path. Unless you were lucky enough to live near a company that did Shakespeare in the Park (or something similar), chances are your first contact with the Bard came from reading his plays rather than seeing them performed (let alone performed well). They were, further, taught to you by increasingly unenthused-and-incompetent public school teachers, and paired with workbook assignments about the importance of suicide/depression/domestic violence awareness (depending on whether your first exposure was to Romeo & Juliette, Hamlet, or Macbeth, respectively).

Your first exposure to the Bible, on the other hand, if you had any at all, was in church. Again, this exposure was compulsory, generally delivered to you by people who were either quite bored with the material (if you were a mainline Protestant) or who were using the material as a vehicle to push your particular sect’s moral indoctrination program (which you found tended to disintegrate upon contact with the outside world). And that’s if you were lucky—if you were unlucky you got either none of the Bible at all, either through your religion or due to your lack of it.

As for the trades? Forget it. If you’re middle class, the last thing you’re going to learn about are trades. The great dignity of being middle class is that you don’t have to do dirty jobs. So how are you going to know what it means to throw a monkey wrench into the works, or sand in the gears, or to level with someone (or be square with them), or to have too many irons in the fire, or to attract more flies with honey than vinegar?

Story is a way of thinking by analogy, and it’s the most basic human mode of thought. Kids who grow up in story-rich households don’t just have an advantage because they’re learning the idioms of English without even realizing it, they’re at a major advantage (at least in terms of quality-of-life) because they’re constantly being affirmed in their tendency to think by analogy.

Without this mode, they can only learn by rote or by rationality, which means that they can never navigate the world on their own. They become dependent on those who can think and learn independently.

It may be that this crippling was the point of schooling (I argue such in my upcoming book The Art of Agency), but whether it was or not, it’s not enough to explain the current state of affairs. It took a staggering confluence of factors required to kick all the pins out from under the linguistic and narrative tower.

Since the 1950s, every successive generation has drifted further from cultural bedrock precisely because the stories that formed the cultural narrative were taught as if they were times tables—the preceding generations communicated little love or enthusiasm for these stories, so the generations being trained in them had little reason to hang on to them beyond test-taking time. The increase in material prosperity allowed the illusion that such things are unnecessary anyway, and eventually even the compulsory training lost its content (as well as its teeth)—what parent, after all, would be eager to subject their children to indoctrination that they themselves considered something between pointless (school) and abusive (bad schools and bad churches)? You don’t need that crap anyway—the future is STEM. Right?

And so with each generation the cultural soil is scraped a little barer, as the adults unthinkingly deprive the children of nutrients that they (the adults) didn’t even know were essential.

Generations Lost

And so we return to my friend and I, sitting on the log. Like most of her generation, my friend knows how to think in the dogma in which she was trained (i.e. rigid progressive moralism), even though it’s a dogma she thinks is bullshit. She can pull apart anything with a simple cause an effect chain. But, like most of her generation, she thinks the idiosyncrasies of language are incomprehensible, weird, and stupid. And, like most of the gifted kids of her generation, despite having a top-flight mind, she struggles to make sense out of any metaphor, story, or real-life interaction that has more than one layer or one dimension.

Her only language is English, and, as we talked on that log all through that afternoon, my heart sank as I realized that she is not fluent.

Oh, she speaks it as well as those kids at the detention facility, but she can’t think in it.

Naturally, I couldn’t tell my friend that she couldn’t speak English—any such pronouncement coming from me, who is in the business of bandying words like a bloviating bastard would have come off as posturing, if not abuse.

But she doesn’t know its metaphors.

She doesn’t know its idioms.

She doesn’t know its stories.

And she has been trained in how not to think.

YouTube to the Rescue!

Fortunately, I have a secret vice (well, secret until now):

YouTube reactor channels.

Basically, they’re videos of younger-than-me people watching old movies for the first time. I got into them because understanding how audiences react to stories is useful for a writer. I kept watching them because I was enchanted by seeing the experience of understanding when a famous line, or an image from a popular meme, or a story point that is the basis for a popular idiom crossed their consciousness for the first time.

The joy, the wonder, the sheer liberation they display (uniformly, whether men or women, American or European) when they suddenly “get it” is astonishing. They feel like, for a moment, they’ve suddenly graduated. They’re in-the-know. Their world has just gotten bigger.

So as I sat on that log I started telling stories. As the afternoon wore on, I recited The Raven, and we talked about the history of ravens as psychopomps, and how the raven in the poem was a metaphor for grief. I summarized other stories, told her some of the old mythic tales from the Bible and the Odyssey. We talked about a couple of my novels that she liked, and what old stories they were pulling from.

The next time I saw her, she was reading a novel that was written before she was born—a hobby she’d more-or-less given up on in high school.

She’s still not fluent, but I caught her, not long after, using a metaphor she constructed herself.

If you want access to the world, learn to love its stories.

And if you want to save the future, stop teaching young children to think with logic.

Teach them first to love stories.

Then teach them to evaluate with logic.

One cannot render judgment upon that which one does not value.