In the late 1990s, a friend of mine questioned my sanity due to my subscriptions to the daily newspapers in Washington, D.C. He asked me why I did not just read them on the internet (this was before paywalls, so content was free). I explained that I preferred to read the paper versions. I like to hold the newspapers in my hands. My friend called me a “Luddite”, to which I would respond that the internet was just a passing fad. That would drive him into a frenzy every time, just like Pavlov’s dog, sputtering and explaining that I was hopelessly old fashioned. Perhaps so.
Another time I launched an experiment into reclaiming the English language. I picked the word “gay”, which means happy. Or at least it used to, until the LGBTQ++ crowd misappropriated the word. I was offended by this perversion of language, so I began by replying to the question as to how was I, that I was fine, I was gay. That went over like a lead balloon, stupefying some who thought they knew me well, so after 2 weeks, I abandoned the experiment. I am no longer gay, I am just damn depressed.
In any event, some things are too important for us to allow their decline. The printed word, and the spoken word, are 2 of them. Both are critically important to being an educated individual. Both are critically important to a literate and functioning society. And both are sadly in steep decline.
I commend to you the following 2 articles, touching on the importance of language. I hope you enjoy.
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Books at Home
If you want to enhance your website, try reading — and not from a screen.
BY: Jeffrey Folks, The American Thinker (July 24, 2026).
In a couple of decades, we will celebrate a momentous event: the invention of the printing press.
Johann Gutenberg’s first major book was the 1455 Latin Bible, but he had printed shorter works as early as 1450. What we now call “printing” has changed significantly over the intervening six centuries, but the end product — words printed on paper — has not. Gutenberg might have been astounded by the ease with which we print books — and with the existence of a printing press (called a “printer”) in almost every home — but he would have recognized the end product immediately. Books have been printed using some form of printing press for nearly six centuries.
Not so long ago, it was a sign of status to own and display books in one’s office or home. Actually, it was not just a sign; there was a causative relationship between owning books and raising children into the upper and middle classes. The presence of books, especially at home, increased the tendency for children to begin reading on their own and to be successful in school and at work. Books at home made children more comfortable with reading and more likely to choose a career in which reading played an important role. One could be an excellent roofer without much literacy, but doctors, lawyers, accountants, and professors were all expected to be highly literate.
Dolly Parton recognized this when she established a charity to distribute a small “library” of books (“Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library”) to poor households in Appalachia, where she was born. Distributing books is one of the best things Parton could have done to benefit children like herself who never had a chance to read their own books at home. I’m sure her charity made a difference in the lives of many, encouraging them to move from poverty into the middle class.
As recently as the 1960s, door-to-door salesmen came to one’s home selling sets of encyclopedias, and those who could not afford a new set often bought one used. It was, in effect, the Wikipedia of its day, where one could magically access an article on almost any topic in just a few minutes. And like other kinds of reading (assignments to read Shakespeare, Austen, Hawthorne, or various histories and other textbooks), it encouraged more reading and made one more fluent at doing so. Those assigned to read one play by Shakespeare would often go on to read others, just out of curiosity. Pride and Prejudice was an open door to an imaginative world of great wisdom and humanity.
Now all this has changed. Gutenberg would have recognized today’s printed book or magazine, but he would have been clueless about the computers, phones, pads, and other screens that have largely displaced printing on paper. And I suspect he would have recognized a qualitative difference between the two.
Most families today do not display libraries of books, nor do they make much use of public libraries. (Only 48 percent of Americans made any use of a public library within the past year). Their constant companions today are the smartphone and the computer, with 91 percent of adults owning a smartphone and the average American checking his phone 205 times daily. Children now grow up with a different mentality from what they had just fifty or sixty years ago. I knew a young man who spent his Christmas break reading War and Peace and bragged about it afterwards, to the admiration of his teachers if not all of his friends at school. Another friend, still in her mid-teens and influenced by her libertarian father, read the complete works of Ayn Rand and became a lifelong conservative herself. I doubt if that amount and intensity of reading is commonplace today. One report reveals that only a small minority of teens have read even one full-length novel like Moby-Dick.
In its place are generations of non-book-readers who are more comfortable with words appearing on computers and phones. Researchers have debated whether there is much difference between reading from paper and reading from screens. I believe that there is, though nothing will turn back the clock.
The days when printed books were a central part of education and later life are gone forever. The Age of Gutenberg is over. Those of us who still read or re-read books like Moby-Dick and Crime and Punishment were raised before the advent of screens and probably just find it difficult to adapt, even though these and millions of other books are available in digital form online. We feel we’re not actually “reading” unless we have a physical book in our hands, and we find it difficult to focus on screens.
It appears that the human brain and human society are changing, just as it began to change six centuries ago with the widespread availability of printed books. There is evidence that reading, by which we mean extended periods of concentration focused on a book, actually “transforms the brain by enhancing cognitive functions, strengthening neural connections, and promoting neuroplasticity, leading to improved memory, empathy, and overall mental health.” Certainly, it increases the ability to engage in critical thinking and to make more precise verbal distinctions.
Is it an accident that among those generations that no longer have the patience to read a 700-page novel like Anna Karenina, with all of its sensitivity and instances of empathy, that “ultimate fighting” has proven popular? One headline from the UFC website reads, “Machine Gun Kelly Doubles Down on Conor McGregor Hate after His Injury at UFC229 — F— This Dude.” Not exactly Shakespeare or Wordsworth, and it is a reflection of a cruder and less empathetic way of thinking on the part of the fighters and their audience.
Serious readers have always been in the minority, but even more so in the post-Gutenberg era. By the time we celebrate the 600-year anniversary of the printing press, there will probably be even fewer books being printed and libraries will be increasingly centers of digital devices and coffee shops. But we should not lose sight of the value of printed books — of what they have contributed and still have to contribute to human society.
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The War on Intelligence
BY: Brandon Morse (July 17, 2026).
I was in the fifth grade when a family moved in next door. They had many children, one of whom was my age. We would spend a lot of time hanging out in front of our house, where his older brother would come out and talk with us from time to time.
At the time, I never thought about how I spoke or the words I used, but right in the middle of talking, the older brother would sometimes interrupt me.
“You’re using so many big, fancy words. Just talk normally.”
I thought I was talking normally. I’d always talked like that, and to this day, I don’t think I ever really kicked the habit. I sometimes feel like I have a tick in my brain that makes me search for accurate, descriptive words that aren’t used in everyday conversation, especially when I’m excited, because I can’t find simpler words that are just as accurate.
Regardless, from then on, I tried to tamp down on using “big words” because I thought I was weird for my vocabulary. Like those smart kids on Disney Channel shows that had a high vocabulary and were also nerdy and weird, and were sometimes even the main character’s antagonist.
It wasn’t until much later that I found I wasn’t the weird one. For all intents and purposes, I actually spoke normally for a basic English speaker. Compared to some others, my vocabulary isn’t even as enormous as it could be. I just happened to read a few more books than others when I was a kid, and was blessed with an interest in writing. It gave me an edge among my peers, that’s all.
The more I read, the more I realized how much of the English language I didn’t know. C.S. Lewis, the person who inspired me the most in almost every way, was dishing out words that I’d never heard, though, once learned, became way more common for me in everyday life. In fact, he was so inspirational that I didn’t find out until later that I was actually spelling more than a few words the way the British would spell them, not the American way.
Regardless, my vocabulary expanded.
It was when I got into writing professionally that it was made pretty clear that I still had a massive chunk of knowledge missing about my own language. Over time, my vocabulary expanded even more, and that knowledge gives me the ability to read and comprehend important books and writings.
To be clear, I’m not saying I’m smarter than everyone. Far from it. The more I learn, the more I realize how dumb I am. I’m probably just a man of average intelligence who reads a lot of books and articles, and gets first-hand experience because I’m also a habitual writer both on and off this site.
Why am I telling you this about myself?
Because the more I interact with people, especially my own generation and Gen Z, the more I realize how lucky I am that I know my own language as well as I do, because others don’t, and it shows in their knowledge, their lack of logical thinking, their reliance on emotions to guide them, not outcomes, and their struggles with abstract concepts.
What inspired me to write about all this was a video I came across on YouTube by a young girl who started up a YouTube channel called “The War on Beauty.” Unlike “modern” Gen Z girls, the beauty this one is concerned about is the beauty of Western culture. Her YouTube is full of videos discussing what’s causing the West to decline and celebrating aspects of it that are worth holding up and preserving.
The video that got my attention, however, was one titled “The past is a foreign language,” where she details the societal angle of everything I just talked about above. People are losing the English language. They’re not being taught how to use it properly; in fact, using it as you should is considered pompous and nerdy. It was my friend’s older brother’s attitude, but it spread across the Western world.
And she makes an incredible point in her video.
If we can’t understand our language to the extent we should today, then we’re definitely not going to understand the people who built our civilizations, the wisdom they held, their reasoning behind the decisions they made, and even the laws by which we function as a society.
I’d encourage you to watch her video in full. It’s about 11 minutes long, but she makes some incredible points about how our lack of understanding of our own language is actually helping to erode our civilization. We can’t read our own laws, we can’t imbibe the wisdom of those who came before, and we can’t expand our imaginations through storytelling or think critically.
What alarmed me in this video is that she points out an article called “The End of Reading Is Here” by The Atlantic, published earlier this month. In it, a Harvard assistant director claimed that a student was struggling to read a book written in “Old English.”
The book?
“A Clockwork Orange.”
The student was apparently using ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier words.
Language naturally shifts and changes over time. In 500 years, the way I’m speaking now may sound pretty archaic, but I fear that the change won’t have happened because our speech evolved, but that it will become less than what it is. That we bred people less willing to embrace the incredible intellectual power of the English language, which helped build incredible wonders the world has never seen before, so they could be “like folks.”
If that’s the case, I have to wonder if we’ll ever see that kind of advancement again.
GFK
Observations From The Fifth Estate 