Something I learned today:
I’m in college now, and I’m being introduced to new ideas. One of them is the idea of conversation vs. talking.
You see, we had to read the first chapter of some book by a guy named Zeldin. He seems like a well-learned man who has clearly studied the act of conversation throughout the ages. He talks about the different ways that people have conversed throughout history. In one instance, it is mentioned how the scientific movement brought a desire among people for clarity and truthfulness in conversation above all else, rejecting rhetoric and hype for “plain talk”.
“Speaking and writing clearly, without frills, forced people to develop a more scientific attitude, to abandon magic and superstition. And also people began to criticize rhetoric as anti-democratic: snobbish, deliberately obscure, repressive of real feelings. They equated it with the cult of the genteel, the desire to be superior. Plain talk triumphed in the United States in the nineteenth century, forcing the pretentious to stop tyrannizing others with the etiquette or affectation. But plain talk sometimes degenerated into a rejection of standards and an admiration for the speech of the uneducated. It became even more obscure than rhetoric (“obscure” here means “not expressing meaning clearly or plainly. I thought that particular definition and usage was kind of obscure). In the same way, scientific clarity was carried so far that it became jargon, comprehensible only to the initiated.” Continue reading →
I am the oldest of five children. It goes without saying that I watch a lot of kids’ movies.
