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Monsù Desiderio, The Tower of Babel |
I’m thinking about human relationships, specifically the way
we communicate.
I used to take great delight in my facility with language, a
skill developed largely because my father read to us incessantly as children:
Lewis, Tolkien and other writers consistently above our grade level. As a result,
we paid little attention to grammar lessons in school; they were largely
redundant. We didn’t need to know a word was a gerund or an adjective to use it
aptly in a sentence or to spell it correctly. Such things were innate.
You know the old saw: “To a man with a hammer, everything
looks like a nail”. I figured language was the key to pretty much everything.
If one were only logical enough, if one could only make a convincing argument,
then everything was potentially within one’s grasp. You could manipulate, coax,
coerce or persuade anyone to do just about anything you wanted.