About Love Letters and Cavemen
Post 488:
When it comes to the English language, older is better. This makes me ask a series of questions that take me all the way back to a time when dudes were wearing squirrel pelts around their bits and had less than adequate dental care.
Let me make my generalization clear. By English, I’m talking after Shakespeare. We could go back to Chaucer, but it was still pretty nascent as a thing. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary was 1755, so the real nuts and bolts were already in place sometime between 1600 (Shakespeare) and 1755 (Johnson).
Assumptions, but this makes sense. We’ve got our highest-level purveyor of the word rocking in Elizabethan times, and we’ve got a codified frigging lexicon for the masses by 1755. Tons of people were reading by the mid 18th century, obviously.
And they were reading great stuff. They were hearing great stuff. The written word was more descriptive, more evocative, more artistic. There was poetry in prose and vice versa. Is there still? Of course. But when I read my latest novel from the bestseller list, the proficiency ain’t what it was.
Okay. This can be disputed. But I’ll run it back, just so you know I’m not completely mad. Read accounts of letters between ordinary soldiers in WW2 to their wives. Lovely stuff. WW1. Lovelier still. Go back to the Civil War and your heart breaks under the weight of poetic awesomeness. Revolutionary War, you’ve got Lieutenant Josiah Vanderknocker sending home stuff to the misses that would make your average romance writer of today seem like a kid in first grade writing love letters in crayon.
I think these are good examples, because they’re normal people. And they knew how to say things.
For more examples, look at speeches and popular books. A Tale of Two Cities was mad popular and published just before our Civil War. Take the Gettysburg Address. Most people read it with fondness today, but that’s only if they can understand it. Sure, it’s too flowery. Too many words. Frigging 272 words. That’s called making words count.
So maybe English isn’t degenerating. Maybe we’re seeing a type of evolution. It has to be, after all. How could people even understand awesome language back in the day? They were all unwashed yokels, I thought.
Unless they weren’t. Maybe they were just as smart as us. Smarter?
I don’t know. They certainly didn’t know about quantum physics, but ask yourself how much the average guy today knows about quantum physics. How many quantum physicists have you ever seen together at once?
These are just questions. Questions are hard because they involve admitting that you don’t know something. I hate it. But there’s freedom there.
So what about Ancient Rome? Were those mutts frigging Jupiter-worshiping psychos that wanted to run rampant in the stony streets? Probably some of them were. Just like now.
What about Babylon and Egypt and the Chinese Empire and all the way back to the frigging cavemen?
I’ve read a lot of books, which means I know a couple things but pretty much nothing. I know how to be intellectually honest. And lazy. Sometimes at the same time.
So when I think about cavebro, the image pretty much pops up in its entirety. Really hairy. Grunting. He’s got a club. And he’s knocked some poor woman over the head and is dragging her back to the innards of his cave to be all horrible and everything.
But do I know any of that happened with regularity? Was this the caveman SOP?
Maybe. Honestly, probably. But I don’t know that this was the normal domestic situation for cavebro.
The only things I know are that he was kind of an artist dude with all the paintings on the walls. He was a survivor, because—us. And he had a cave. If I’m being honest, I don’t think he needed a club to get a girl. He had a condo. Nice warm kitchen. Sensitive type, drawing stuff on the walls for the ladies. My guess is, he was a warrior-poet. He probably did okay. I’d rather hang out with caveman than field-man.
And that’s what I take away from a couple of old books and love letters.
Cheers. See you after.
