Old World Eloquence

How to re-train yourself to speak better: a lesson from Charlotte Mason

One of the primary ways we may identify the modern person from the pre-digital person is by listening to how they express themselves. You may get an ordinary man or woman from 1890s England, put them in modern clothes and they will still speak in a much more beautiful and expressive way than we speak today. We know this because reading a newspaper from 1910 feels like reading classic literature. Books like Dickens and Austen, written for the common lay-person is today considered high-brow “educated” writing. Letters between soldiers and their wives far surpasses the writing found in poetry and best-selling books today. What has happened? There are many theories that may help explain the degradation of modern language. Digital convenience in our observation and communication is a primary culprit. This diagnosis makes the cure equally evident. And I have recently discovered the cure for this degradation in the most curious of places: a book on Home Education by a governess trainer from 1823 named Charlotte Mason. Let us pretend that we are her students, and see how we may re-train ourselves to speak with the eloquence of the Old World.

In a world where people seemingly ‘write’ so much on social media and speak so much on tiktok and instagram, how can it be that the ordinary person has little proficiency in either of these tasks? The skill involved in eloquent and detailed speech and writing is not an innate trait but rather a skill which must be nurtured in people and which has been severely harmed by the digital age. This is because digital media has ravaged our ability to pay attention, observe, recall and therefore to communicate. Digital media has permitted us to be lazy with our attention, observation and recall, and as these muscles fell into disuse, they became atrophied. But how exactly?

Prior to direct messages on social media, we had to remember the day to day occurrences of our lives and narrate them into a coherent and detailed story to compose a letter. Our correspondences required far more effort. One might write a letter to a number of friends, relatives who lived far away. If the correspondence was not kept, there was no other way to maintain the relationship other than seeing each other in person when possible. If you indeed saw your parents, siblings or friends after a long time spent apart, you’d have to put in the effort to recall the details of your life in a good way in order to capture things accurately and with relevance. This means that when things happened to you, you put in some effort to remember them in such a way that would be easy to recall later on. The faculty of the memory plays an important role in one’s ability to observe and attend to the world.

Today, people’s face-time friends and family so they have no use for describing their surroundings for example. This means that you yourself pay no great attention to them either, because you have no need to commit the details of the colour of your house, the kind of trees on your street to some linguistic articulation for recollection later on. Because they never feel the need to remember or communicate it, the modern person ends up not even seeing their own life very well. Think about it, how well can you describe the street you live on? How well can you describe the face of the person who serves your coffee every day?

In her book, Home Education, Charlotte Mason describes the exercise of mental landscape painting for children. In this exercise, children are taken to some lovely view, told to look at it for a few minutes and then they are made to close their eyes and describe it in as great detail as possible. This is a very challenging and mentally taxing exercise not just for children, but for modern people who have never had to strain to remember anything. I tried doing it several times over the last few weeks and it has revealed to me how many things I was not seeing in my own every day life!

We don’t need to remember what a new acquaintance looks like, we can just share his picture. We don’t need to strain to pay attention to all the details of a beautiful view we saw on vacation, we can just show a picture of it. People who enjoy fine art will understand how the analog exercise acquaints us with every detail of a scene in the way photography never can. You won’t notice the blue flowers growing at the edge of a lake or the hue of the water or that the clouds are shaped a certain way when you just take a picture in one second and then move on to the next thing.

Even when it comes to sharing digital media itself, we do not put the mildest strain on our powers of articulation. Look in most people’s text messages, dms and group chats and what you’ll find is rarely conversation. You’ll find links to tiktoks or reels or at best photos and videos often without even the courtesy of a caption. They don’t strain to describe what they saw, why they found it interesting or funny or express themselves at all. What requirement is there to describe something if it can simply be “re-shared”? What are we missing out on by obviating the interlocutor?

What would happen if we decided to express ourselves instead? Or at the very least to describe what we saw rather than just share the link?

It is quite simple: when we remove our ability to speak, we remove our ability to see, to think and to remember. These comprise the primary functions of the human intellect. If we have removed our ability to observe and attend to the world around us and our own experiences, if we have atrophied our memory by disuse because it has been outsourced to the digital cloud, what can be said but that the human mind has been replaced by the digital algorithm? We mustn’t be surprised that an entire generation cannot express themselves like human beings if they have abdicated the core pillars of their human intellect.

The desire to stay human is the desire to not be reduced to beastly grunts of pleasure or pain. The world is being zombified into useless eater who like and dislike as their primary mode of expression. A laugh emoji. What is a “share” to group chat compared to even the most primitive cave paintings?

The neanderthal who knew neither alphabet nor word was more sophisticated in his articulation with a hand print on a stone wall than the modern beast that knows only how to speak in meme.

Pre-programmed “slang” replaces earnest expression. “The body is body-ing” and “body is teeeea kween” is a legitimate compliment a woman commonly receives on a flattering photo. This is an indictment on the intellect of a whole civilization. We must re-learn adjectives: tall, short, big, small, ravishing, lovely, little big, rough, smooth. We must enrich our language again. It is a fact that when a person learns the names of more colours, they also notice far more colours in their lives. Perhaps we may have a greater breadth and depth of human experience if we simply put in the effort to articulate them better.

How can this be done? Both by reading high quality writing and by endeavouring to write and express more often.

“The limits of my language are the limits of my world” writes philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Let us not make our world so little and dim. Let us re-awaken an atrophied intellect and fight against the rot by describing again. Let us speak to one another again rather than simply have AI robots speak to each other while we sit like flesh suits in the corner. Cucked into a vicarious existence. Dormant button pushers keeping the screens alive as they live for us.

Attend, Observe, Remember. Then pick up the pen and write.