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| "These are the times that try men's souls." Thomas Paine's essay, starting with eight (8) monosyllables, encouraged Americans to win their freedom. |
I do a lot of reading from the Internet, politics, various sources. One only needs a few words to fill a peroration, a story, a joke, or news. The American vocabulary starts with f, s, and a few more - constantly, multiplied within the same sentence, without any restraint from journalists, celebrities, politicians, and even worse characters. The crudest words are elevated as the purest expressions, including the divine names.
When I taught writing, I challenged the classes to think about something without a word or words. Silence prevailed because no one could handle a thought without words.
Shakespeare's "little Latin and less Greek" has become an impossibility because our own language rises no more than Dick, Jane, and Sally, a reading book forced upon us in second grade. But now, the book is not wanted or needed because they can only watch the screen and listen, a sure sign of mental atrophy.
Confessing that I signed up for Greek in college, I had to explain the worth of the classics (aka Latin, Greek) to my bewildered elders. I did not imagine that the famous Paine textbook for college Greek would indicate something to Christina. I was thinking "ancient Greek!" and she was asking "seminary?" I started on the Gospel of John in the Paine book, only to find out in seminary that Greek was fading fast. I was the exception in a class of 10.
The hunger for knowledge is another way of looking at our country's downfall. If our minds are not guided by reading the Scriptures and the classics of the world, we have nothing to offer except one-syllable words.
One indication is the fury of people who read my posts and wrote furious letters filled with all kinds hatred, buffoonery, and ignorance. Then they said I wrote my own comments anonymously.
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| I shocked "Dr" Larry Olson when I said, "I read Drucker's tapes." |
