Mary Clark describes a two year-old's speech as “The Telegraphic Stage”, meaning a language lacking in inflection and function words. Much like the old-time telegraph, where word-count was at a premium and brevity was paramount, little kids get by with a focus on economy of words. Who needs “I think I'd like to eat that” when a kid can point and say “me eat”? Naturally, as the kid progresses along the development road, he/she grows into more sophisticated language structures to convey more complex meanings. But when you're two, who needs the sophistry, right?
Little kids, and one other social group: the catastrophically drunk. There's nothing like seeing a drunk guy cornering a girl in a bar and telling her, “you very pretty”. There's an advanced level of inebriation that strips away the structural elegance of language, leaving only a bare-bones armature of intention. A few drinks can have the opposite effect: garrulous chatter, circling around the long way to get to the point. But if the drinking continues, eventually the drinker enters the dire verbal wasteland of the telegraphic stage: clumsy gestures and simple phrases of brute-force intent.
Yeah, drunks are funny; but, on further thought I was intrigued as to how the abysmally drunk can devolve in such a parallel to the normal evolution of language. It begs the question of how language develops, how layers of meaning and sophisticated verbal constructs are learned and become second nature to the average adult; but when those cognitive processes fall by the wayside (a wayside littered with beer-bottles), language becomes a matter of bare functionality. It becomes primitive. The silky imagery of Byron becomes the grunting of the caveman: she walks in beauty like the night / of cloudless climes and starry skies becomes you berry pretty lady. No artifice, no elegance; just bare brute intention.
It takes years of development to gain the arcane skills of language, and only one good happy-hour to lose it all. Thanks to this class and Mary Clark, I'll never see another bar-room courtship quite the same way again. I'll leave this, my last POP of the term with a few words of wisdom from that magic place where toddlers and tipplers meet.
This is what it looks like when prostitutes are workin' it. That's Sweet-cheeks John McCain on the left, Luscious Barack Obama on the right, and look at the Big Money trying to be inconspicuous in the cute little Dodge Neon.
