A famous English man of letters, reduced by the expense of his vices to writing for a popular tabloid, used to refer disparagingly to his readers as “people who move their lips when they read.”
The implication, of course, was that folks who sound out the words they are reading are somehow less intelligent than those who don’t, and are thus unable to appreciate truly great prose.
Actually, this doesn’t necessarily follow. Indeed, in the not too distant past, in fact, everybody who could read moved their lips as they did so. And they didn’t merely move their lips, they actually read right out loud—even when they were all alone and the only ones to hear what was being read.
This wasn’t simply a habit of the folks Karl Marx dubbed the “lumpen proletariat.” Everybody did it, and not just real oldies like The Venerable Bede and Geoffrey Chaucer—or even middling oldies like Thomas Cranmer, Sir Thomas Moore, Ben Johnson, and William Shakespeare.
The fact of the matter is that the practice went on into the 19th and early 20th Century. Herman Melville, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, and Charles Dickens, and even modernists like Rudyard Kipling—all of them moved their lips as they read.
Such observations might sound a trifle eccentric. After all here in America, we are plain-spoken people. But the truth of the matter is that being plain spoken doesn’t necessarily mean that one speaks plainly. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Our television sets provide object lessons in this on a daily basis. Next time you watch a TV interview, count the “ums” and “ahs”, “likes” and “sort ofs” the interviewee utters. Then try to recall how much of the message they were trying to get across was actually expressed in their own words and how much of it you deduced or extrapolated. It is a rather depressing exercise, for it graphically illustrates how inarticulate we, as a nation, have become.
The fact that President Obama is generally considered to be one of the nation’s most eloquent public speakers is another example of our declining articulacy. It is not that he is a bad speaker, far from it. He is certainly among the best we have. But neither he nor any of his contemporaries are able to approach the economical elegance, say, of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
William Shakespeare had barely a Sixth Grade education. He wrote not for the gentry and intellectuals, but for the scum of the earth—the seething, swearing mob who would as cheerfully watch a bear baited in Southwark or a traitor hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tower Hill.
The frightening thing about this is that, back then, the scum of the earth understood every word Shakespeare wrote, yet today he confounds and flummoxes most of the English majors at our great universities.
And this isn’t because the words have changed in meaning since Shakespeare’s day, Ninety-eight percent of them have precisely the same meaning as they had in the 16th Century. Today’s English majors fail to understand Will Shakespeare because they lack the vocabulary to do so.
This state of affairs cannot be explained by a lack of investment in education, to one parent families, to something in the water, or to anything else that will cost vast sums of money to put right.
It has come to pass because we no longer move our lips when we read; because we no longer read out loud. And this, in turn, has come about because reading aloud is no longer a pleasure—a primary source of recreation.
It was entirely to be expected, of course—a natural by-product not of the radio and television age, but of the industrial revolution. From a business perspective, it simply isn’t efficient to read aloud.
It would take far too much time to read the operating instructions for a computer aloud. Reading invoices and bank statements out loud would be utterly ludicrous. Reading aloud was dying even in its Victorian heyday. Radio gave it a new, albeit tenuous, lease on life, before television arrived to bump it off completely.
Necessity being the mother of invention, there are in the communications industry folks who would make a virtue of our linguistic decline—contending that the computer is rendering the spoken word obsolete; that a picture is worth a thousand words. If that were so, we wouldn’t have invented writing. If pictures were really worth a thousand words, we would still be scrawling on the walls of caves.
The average American’s deteriorating command of the English language has been culturally devastating. For all intents and purposes, poetry is a dead art form, the preserve of a tiny, ever-decreasing coterie of cognoscenti.
Great 19th-century writers like Melville, Dickens, Austen, and the Brontes survive courtesy of Public Television. Even Hollywood’s offerings have suffered. Just compare the scripts of The Man Who Came to Dinner with any modern comedy and the I Love Lucy Show with today’s sitcoms.
But if the price of linguistic decline has been high in the realms of education and entertainment, the cost in the spiritual sphere has been absolutely devastating: We are, in many respects, losing our ability to communicate with God.
It isn’t that we no longer use old fashioned words like “thee” and “thou” and “wouldest” and “saith” (as in “thus saith the Lord)—though such words have their uses in that they constantly remind us of the “otherness” of God.
The real problem is that our increasing disregard for the language we speak makes it difficult for us marshal our thoughts about Him and the sort of relationship we ought to have with Him.
Our modern prayers all too frequently reflect this. At best, they are unmemorable—hardly the sort of thing that sustains soldiers in battle. At worst, they are little better than shopping lists. Yet back in the days when people moved their lips as they read, it was by no means unusual for ordinary people to compose prayers to God.
The key to regaining our lost eloquence is to practice reading aloud. And one of the few remaining places where you can move your lips as you read is a traditional Anglican Church. Indeed, as an added bonus to helping to save the culture, you’ll be worshipping God. GPH✠
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