The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...
Lossy Communication (2026-04-06)
The title of the essay popped up among the many links among my collection of old-fashioned rss feeds. It caught my eye, and I hesitated to open the link. We Are Losing Our Words, by Jeannette Cooperman at washington university's the common reader. The title is on the very edge of clickbait, but unlike clickbait, there is no subheader with some shocking claim about population level IQs or inveighing against "kids these days." Plus, the recommendation with the link is from a sensible source. Alright then, there must be something good there even if the headline writer did flirt with capsizing the essay's figurative boat. And so there is. Cooperman is too polite to be so blunt, but in many ways she is firmly decrying the pressure from far too many editors and what purport to be writing tools to dumb down written work of all kinds for general audiences. In fact, Cooperman is so polite she makes sure to provide some other reasons this matters. Besides noting how "the words we keep ready in the back of our throat reshape our neural pathways every time we use them, creating new connections. They influence what we are capable of perceiving," she refers to evidence of how building and maintaining a broad vocabulary improves empathy and helps counter risk of dementia and general cognitive decline. But truth be told, I love the essay best when she is furiously tearing down the people who continue to push for the sort of writing convenient for inserting advertisements into. It is surreal how a genuine and reasonable critique of technical documents chock-a-block with long sentences of tacked together subordinate clauses and obscure jargon has been turned against just about any writing meant to be published in a magazine, journal, or online equivalent. Or, for that matter, in mass market paperback novels.
There is certainly a grim logic in the pervasive pressure to dumb down writing of all kinds today, beyond colonizing the reading space with advertisements. Advertising companies of the "social media" subspecies are constantly working to prevent people from leaving their websites, and now their "apps." If a person wants or needs to stop looking at the "social media feed" to look up a word, there is a risk they might leave the feed altogether. On the flip side, this also encourages a certain resentment in people who have accepted and gotten used to this type of eviscerated writing when they happen on the real stuff. To their shock, it takes longer to read, takes more effort, and may even force them to use a dictionary and read a sentence or paragraph more than once. Unfortunately, it seems like more and more people interpret this sort of experience as either evidence they can't read this more substantial writing, or as an inappropriate expectation they will take the time and effort to parse it. "Don't make me think" is an appropriate expectation of a program interface, not of something we read. The first few times I encountered the acronym "tldr;" it was funny. Now it is mostly frustrating. How can a person really know if something is too long to read for any reason without actually trying to read that something in the first place? And by "something" I do mean a non-technical essay or article, not longer or more technical items that may demand (gasp) rereading. It is fair enough to skim a bit and conclude, "too long to read right now" or "not on a topic I care to read about," but some respectful engagement is required. Then again, skim reading is also a skill, and not necessarily taught in school these days.
Skim reading is not the same as speed reading, and contrary to the claims of the lingering speed reading applications and courses out there, the most effective way to read faster for those who do not have dyslexia to manage, is to read more. Read more and read widely. In the case of reading for a specific area of interest or study, learn the vocabulary – which does mean for awhile having to grind along with a dictionary of one sort or another. If you really want a leg up and are coping with a western european language, including the mongrel english, among the most effective things you can do is complete a course on latin and greek roots used in science and technology. Books used for these courses are still common denizens of both school and university libraries, and may even turn up in medium-sized public libraries. Or for those inclined to stick to online sources, this query at the internet archive will bring up books and even recordings, some requiring login to use, others always available. The majority of ostensibly "highfalutin'" vocabulary is built on redressed latin and greek roots, and yes making and using words like this was about turning away certain readers. But far more often, as Cooperman observes in her essay, it is about striving to express a new thought or nuance, and just plain to have fun. There are adult versions of the by turns hilarious and wryly annoying word games kids come up wth as they gain skill in their mother tongue. It seems a bitter shame to let advertisers and other jerks bully us away from the fun and creativity language allows, and not just written language.
I find myself thinking also of the visual language of plays and films, and of music of all kinds. All these are under particularly relentless pressure to reduce them to formulae suitable for mindless reproduction first by bored and miserable humans, and then by large language models to maximize immediate profit. It took a sadly long time for more practitioners or other arts to realize the real danger of late stage capitalism and the greedy corporate obsession with enclosure of commons and getting rid of wage labour was from them, not unauthorized copying. (I am not saying unauthorized copying is not an issue as well, because it is, but emphasis on it distracts us from the real enemy of artists and every human engaged in their own culture.) If it was solely up to such capitalists, we would certainly not be permitted to communicate, though we would certainly be permitted to subscribe for a fee.
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