`Impoverished Speech and Language'

From the land of Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson comes news that “Toddlers to get lessons in talking as TV kills conversation.” The Daily Mail reports:

“Research from the children's charity I CAN revealed last year that half of youngsters -- rising to 84 per cent in some areas -- begin formal education with `impoverished speech and language.’ They are unable to utter a whole sentence and can understand only simple instructions.”

What is more appalling: That a once-great nation, the fount of a language that today boasts almost one-million words, more than any other, raises children unable to string but a few dozen together, or that addle-pated politicians would propose spending money to teach children what their parents ought to have been teaching them all along? Fair or not, when we encounter a person unable to express himself well enough to be understood, let alone to enjoy the delights of conversation, we judge that person at least backward if not primitive and potentially dangerous. The inarticulate are often those quickest to resort to anger and even violence when their demands are not understood. Our ability to use language fixes the dimensions of our world. The wordless dwell in dark closets. I look forward to Theodore Dalrymple’s gloss on this latest abomination in his homeland. For now, here is Johnson in The Rambler No. 89, on Jan. 22, 1751:

"After the exercises which the health of the body requires, and which have themselves a natural tendency to actuate and invigorate the mind, the most eligible amusement of a rational being seems to be that interchange of thoughts which is practised in free and easy conversation; where suspicion is banished by experience, and emulation by benevolence; where every man speaks with no other restraint than unwillingness to offend, and hears with no other disposition than desire to be pleased."