Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

When I was eleven years old, reading Robert K. Massie’s Nicolas and Alexandra, I encountered the longest word I had ever seen: counterrevolutionaries. It muscled out most other words in the line, squatting nigh unpronounceably, like an undigestible bolus or sedimentary rock, all prefix and suffix. Even though it had no sensuality or visual aspect to it at all — its physicality is coded into the etymology of volvere, to roll — it repudiated its own abstraction by taking up space, reflexively enacting a trochaic reversal of our customary iambics, and vibrating with the engine of its r’s. I was eleven and I was fascinated.  It strikes me as odd, this random memory of a single word, but children have a primal feeling for language that manifests in their perennial games — tongue-twisters, nursery rhymes, punning jokes — and in their penchant for naming. When he was nine or ten, my son told me that his favorite word was overwhelming. Then he decided it was lawless. It is a truism that kids pick up foreign languages more easily, and that adolescents drive new slang — that language lava. It is hardly unknown for adults to revel in wordplay, to create diminutives and invent limericks, but it isn’t endemic to American English. Not right now, at least. We are more likely to proscribe words, or swap them out for endless euphemism. (Some petty functionary, somewhere, really thinks “unhoused” is a meaningful improvement on “homeless.”) English is the lingua franca of commerce, with its bureaucratese and finance jargon: also not a good sign. And this impoverishment at the general level extends to the literary culture, where too often decisions about what kinds of writing get rewarded are determined by the grownups’ ideological commitment to plainness as a democratic value. Restriction and instrumentalism