Exploring Vocabulary and Language Decline

Over the past few months,

and especially since starting The War on Beauty,

I have set out to read some of these old, difficult, historical books.

And while I would consider

myself a very well educated person,

I went to a great top of the line prep school and graduated from

USC with a bachelor's degree with honors.

In approaching these books by people like Plato,

Friedrich Schiller, Thomas John Ruskin, these are the intellectual greats of

all Western history, I have a very hard time reading them,

especially in the beginning.

It was almost unintelligible to me.

It was like reading a foreign language.

During this process, I have started to keep a running

list of vocabulary words that I don't know in my notes app, which is growing.

quite long, and even now when I scroll past them,

even though I have gone over the definitions for everything,

it's still very hard to remember what those words even mean.

But they were words that once I

did understand them and read them within the context of the sentence,

greatly deepened and enriched the reading experience.

But our vocabulary,

just like practically everything else in our world,

has become condensed and stripped down to the very bare minimum.

So my younger brother Hudson the other day was just reading to

me a passage from George Orwell's 1984 about

how the totalitarian government systematically reduced the English language

to simpler and fewer words

so that civilians would not commit thought crimes.

That the more simple and reduced our language was, more simple and

confined our thinking will be. And that is happening today.

It's actually shown in studies that our vocabulary has declined and shrunk

between the 1970s and the 2010s with the biggest declines among those with

a bachelor's or graduate degree.

That we can retain the very basic skills to understand what our

forebears wrote is so deeply critical.

The past contains a vast amount of the beauty

that we have on planet Earth and it's all contained in the written word and it

is our tether to an incredibly deep well of