Over the past couple of days, Bob Artigiani and I have written about the power and importance of language, spoken and written. The whole business surprises me since society and hormones tend to say to boys and some men that it is muscles and bodyweight that matter, combat tools. I wrote a paper in graduate school on statements of the purpose of higher education. One of the more famous personalities in that history is Robert Hutchins, a man who headed the University of Chicago. He was a relatively young man when he took that position and had things to say about higher education. Both Hutchins and Socrates were aware of the power of words. Hutchins liked to say that politics is the architectonic science.
I am confident that physical appearance and mannerisms matter, also. But you may have heard the statement that the voice of the people is the voice of God. Today, July 14, is Bastille Day, an important day in the history of France, of Europe and in the development of humankind and its ideas of what a government is and should be. I am not a historian but I know that the French revolution, like the Magna Carta, was important in showing the power of people. Ok, mobs, maybe, but it can happen that a demonstration, a riot, a rampage is the only tool that people have to make their wishes known and respected.
We like to think that our human brains are the only ones that get our range and depth of impulses and ideas and the only way I can tell others about the wonderful ideas I have is with words. I can use the old Greek idea of plays to influence others or the modern version, movies and videos, but the process works better and more accurately when I can use words. My home state has a motto in Italian: Manly deeds and womanly words. I think maybe humans are moving toward respecting words as an important tool for both sexes.
All our words are in one language or another. Google says there are 7100 languages spoken somewhere on the planet.
