Articulation is like painting a picture. What brushes will you use? What colors? A master painter knows his brushes, colors, and canvas well. He judges one canvas, painted in primary colors, next to a similar painting with subtle, complex tones, and regardless of the student's pleas of doing it on purpose, he takes more pride in the student who controlled and tamed the colors. Nor does the master ever call a student's work "awesome." To do so would be in poor taste, leaving the beginner with no room to improve. When an artist has tamed the colors, he can legitimately claim to use primaries "on purpose."
The colors and the brushes are a means for sharing an idea. Now, imagine Leonardo painting the Mona Lisa with his fingers, or Monet only having charcoal for a medium. The result--not awesome. Not where the artists wanted to go.
But this isn't just for the masters. Try filling out your daily planner with a crayon, or playing Heart & Soul on your smart phone's piano app. The thing is, articulation is affected by the tools used. In any domain, blunt tools make obtuse details.
Likewise, articulation in speech or writing is a skill largely dependent on its medium. It's true, a separate discussion could be made about the necessary skills of the artist, (some students need never know Pthalo Blue exists), but face it--with Photoshop and about ten minutes training, anybody can compose a picture of "future baby," mixing facial features of themselves and a love interest. No Photoshop, only darkroom experts can do it. No darkrooms, and even the experts can't.
The tool for verbal communication is, of course, language. Our language, English, made up of words and structures we're familiar with, and some we're... not so familiar with.
Imagine descendents of fallen Rome: peasants, illiterate. Doing the natural thing, remolding the words and structure through baby talk, mumbling, and married-couple-silly-talk. It only takes one generation of illiteracy for a written language to be almost foreign. Immigration demonstrates this, as children who are never taught to read and write their mother tongue cannot do so even when literate in a second language. Nowadays, in the middle of our rush-rush, we need to remember the observable value of reading. Not reading enough to pass classes, but reading thoroughly and learning new words. Learn new words, chew on them. When people lean on adolescent and ambiguous vocabulary, it limits what teachers can teach, what students can learn.
Since few of us tuck dozens of classic works of literature into our noggins before high school, and high school teachers slash our papers with red-ink "run-on! run-on!" (don't blame the color of the ink), we're both unexposed to complex sentences and afraid to try forming them. We pick up a George Elliot and smirk like a vindictive teacher's aid over the long sentences, while our own writing suffers from the desire to blend phrases into a concept which five independent clauses back-to-back won't describe any more than blobs of primary color on a canvas will depict a shady ravine.
Now, why this increasing uncertainty of language use? It's our mother tongue, for crying out loud. * Note that I'm not saying unread equals stupid or incoherent, or that bookworms equal master communicators. In fact, I'm more concerned with vocabulary, of which literacy is a foundation like old fortunes paying for public greenways.
Language is born and raised in contexts. But the superpower is subtexts, where a word references much more than one or two words. Literacy and more literacy explodes the power of a single word. The more you've read, the more a single word or phrase means. It's like an inside joke: only, the more people share the knowledge (or, with due respect, watched the movie), the less private the joke is. Speaking to typical Americans, I could play safe and quote Disney movies. Discuss them? Meh, out of boredom maybe. Quote, yes. But I would hesitate to bring up The Happy Hollisters, because I am 99.9% sure that my peers will not have read them, so zero humor in commenting on the characters' series-long age freeze (don't bother clicking the link, it was just a kids' series from the 50's and 60's). Christian inculturation with references to the Bible still influences secular America, hit or miss. Yesterday, testing inculturation upon a nonChristian coworker, I teasingly told him I was "heaping coals of fire," thinking it was a known enough reference that he'd get it, but even his Christian compadre didn't get the reference. Fair enough; it was a gamble. But particularly among Christians, the Bible is a text held in common that hugely unifies communication and values.
Books and movies alike provide massive subtexts for quotes, actors, titles, authors, and famous characters, but rarely in a movie will you find the meaning of a particular word deepened. The written word has a unique solidarity, a reference point. The more someone reads it, the more they "just know" how the language works. The more they are the nerds in class who inform teachers they are wrong--or maybe the college student who doesn't need to do much proofreading on essays. There are rights and wrongs in every language, and internalizing those makes life easier in many subjects.
It's not that the rules of language were not handed out on a stone tablet. They were presumably stumbled or agreed upon. Somebody said so, and whether I wish I'd been in their shoes to say-so differently, here I am keeping it going for my own ends and everybody else's.
So, efficiently or clumsily, language was set it down. People discovered the freedom of communication that comes from commitment, even submission to, a standard which is written down and won't morph so giddily in a cultural salad as does spoken language, and standards make group education possible.
Slang and other changes in language can seem threatening at times, especially when one mumbler meets another. But time will test these growths as warts or new limbs. The threat to communication is not new words, but the falloff, the epic falloff, of existing vocabulary. <--read this. Unfortunately, many movies simply reflect how we currently speak, a relay race into the future of our language. But literature exposes to us many words we've never used, possibly demanding forays into dictionary land, and definitely beating back the atrophy of vocabulary-muscles. Often, I admit, I've composed words to fill in spots where I never learned the right word, because I'm more determined to voice an idea than to have it understood.
To think one achieves fluency and stops there is a mistake, a mistake exposed when speakers invent new words to fill a gap. Fluency, like the word fluid, speaks of grace and ease in a language, the ability to articulate accurately. Most people are "fluent" in English after two or three years, but don't doubt at that stage the need to learn more. But it doesn't stop at ten, or fifteen, or twenty-five. Sure, there is a leveling off; a 60-year-old bookworm probably has a marginally larger vocabulary than an equally dedicated bookworm of 50. But compare them to teenagers It's about words, and their meanings. Listen to an older, well-read person articulating ideas. They know how to spin long sentences patiently filling in the details of a lithographic idea. They have, as it were, a relationship with each word they use. Compare that to a coloring book sentence.
We speak in coloring book sentences, and our adjectives are about as specific as a small set of crayons. We took the cerulean of "Awesome!!" and color everything with it, forgetting there's a common blue for common enthusiasm. We greet people by saying "Greetings," which is a category or box waiting for the greeting itself. One might as well dialog thus: "Conversation!" "Response!" "One-up!" "Change of subject!" "Request for embellishment!" and so on.
Twilight, or the Age getting Darker?
On the upside, I feel a measure of joy when public speakers manhandle big words like a puppy practicing grownup barks. They're learning, reading, bolstering the foundation. I'm less worried about damage done to our language by that kind of public misuse, than by private neglect. Public misuse may parallel forward progress, but private neglect is where the massive falloff is happening. An occasional malopropism (which I just almost called anachronism, case in point), incurred by a belated but timely endeavor to read more books won't hinder the audience's knowledge of English NEARLY as much as the audience's time spent in books will help. Being perpetual students of our mother tongue, spilling malopropisms and being corrected--all refine the kind of articulation many are giving up on. Struggle on, or settle for coloring book English... which will you have?
*Who knew that "For crying out loud" was a minced oath? The knowledge is only a click away with the brilliant linking technology blogger pages afford. ...Who even needs to be well-read when you can link any uncertain words or phrases to an external source? Wotwotwot. It's very good therapy, I'm sure (wotwotwot...) for the A.D.D. epidemic.
