The Kingdom of Speech (15 page)

The answer was to come not from the digital universe…but from analogical terrain that seemed sunk in the past, not only because the concept is so simple that at first most linguists couldn't think of it as a concept. It comes down to a single word: mnemonics

By 350
BCE
both Plato and Aristotle were writing about mnemonics, and Aristotle was working on a complete system of analysis. The word “mnemonic” is derived from the Greek
mnemom,
meaning “mindful.” The
m
is silent, like the
p
in “pneumonia.” A mnemonic is a device, essentially a trick, a sleight-of-mind, an easy-to-remember key for opening up a body of knowledge too long, too detailed, too cumbersome, too complicated, or simply too tiresome, too annoying, to have to memorize without a memory aid—which is the two-word definition of a mnemonic. The Greeks favored so-called topical, or loci (meaning “locations”), mnemonics, in which each term, name, or number is imagined to be in a particular area of a certain room on a certain floor in one of an endless row of identical houses. It was surprisingly easy to gather them up later in the right order. Probably the best known mnemonics in English are “metrical” mnemonics: “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November”…“
I
before
E
except after
C
”…“In fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue”…“Red sky at night, shepherd's delight; red sky in morning, shepherd's warning.”

 Today mnemonics is not thought of as anything more practical than a memory device for remembering ingredients, lists, and in some cases formulas.Virtually all the sciences depend upon mnemonics, typically in the form of sentences or phrases in which the first letter of each word stands for a different item or procedure—or even in the form of a single word whose letters stand for different components. Chemistry, for example, produces mnemonics by the gross. Some are rather clever, such as the one for organic chemistry's sequence of dicarboxylic acids: oxalic, malonic, succinic, glutaric, adipic, pimelic, suberic, azelaic, and sebacic. If you capitalize the first letter of each word and are clever enough, you can come up with
“
O
h
M
y,
S
uch
G
ood
A
pple
P
ie,
S
weet
A
s
S
ugar.”
That's the mnemonic.

The sequence of orbitals (areas in which electrons move), designated
s p d f g h i k
,
is transformed into a mnemonic almost as easy to remember:
S
ober
P
hysicists
D
on't
F
ind
G
iraffes
H
iding
I
n
K
itchens
.

The lanthanide series of elements, which goes “La Ce Pr Nd Pm Sm Eu Gd Tb Dy Ho Er Tm Yb Lu,” generates
“
L
ame
C
elibate
P
rudes
N
eed
P
romiscuous
S
mut with
E
uropean
G
ods
.
T
roublesome
D
ying
H
o, it's
E
rotic
T
i
M
e,
Y
ou
B
itch
LU
st!”

One of the so-called activity series of metals goes “K>Na>Mg>Al>Zn>Fe>Pd>H>Cu>Au” and gets neatly mnemonicked into
“
K
angaroos
N
aturally
M
uck
A
bout in
Z
oos
F
or
P
urple
H
ippos
C
hasing
A
ardvarks.”

And no student of the mnemonic arts is likely to leave out the one that turns the mile-long electrochemical series “potassium>sodium>calcium>magnesium>aluminum>zinc>iron>tin>lead>hydrogen>copper>silver>gold” into a mini poem:
“
P
addy
S
till
C
ould
M
arry
A
Z
ulu
I
n
T
he
L
ovely
H
onolulu,
C
ausing
S
trange
G
azes.”

Language itself, the mother of all mnemonics, is precisely the same sort of device that chemistry employs. Words are elemental mnemonics, sequences of sounds (the alphabet) used to remember everything in the world, from the smallest to the greatest. Speech, language, is a matter of using these mnemonics, i.e., words, to create meaning.

And that is all that speech is, a mnemonic system—one that has enabled
Homo sapiens
to take control of the entire world. It is language, and only language and its mnemonics, that creates memory as
Homo sapiens
experiences it. Even the smartest apes don't have thoughts so much as conditioned responses to certain primal pressures, chiefly, the need for food and the fear of physical threats.

But in point of fact mnemonics isn't just in the service of language. Mnemonics
is
language. Throughout the history of language—and it's quite irrelevant to try to make the usual paleontological guesses as to when that was—man has converted objects, actions, thoughts, concepts, and emotions into codes, conventionally known as words. No one now knows…and there is no reason why anyone is likely to ever know…when it occurred to
Homo sapiens
to use words as mnemonics. But there are now between six thousand and seven thousand different mnemonic systems, better known as languages, covering the world today. They, and they alone,
are
language…they are simple and clear. Perhaps it can be amusing to watch otherwise bright people banging their brainpans into the same firewall, herds of them, schools of them, generations of them, whole Eras and Ages of them, an entire bright universe of them, endlessly—but for how long?

Bango!
One bright night it dawned on me—not as a profound revelation, not as any sort of analysis at all, but as something so perfectly obvious, I could hardly believe that no licensed savant had ever pointed it out before. There
is
a cardinal distinction between man and animal, a sheerly dividing line as abrupt and immovable as a cliff: namely, speech.

“Speech,” I said to myself, “gave the human beast far more than an ingenious tool for communication. Speech was a veritable nuclear weapon!”

Speech was the first artifact, the first instance in which a creature, man, had removed elements from nature…in this case, sounds…and turned them into something entirely new and man-made…strings of sounds that formed codes, codes called words. Not only is speech an artifact, it is the primal artifact. Without speech the human beast couldn't have created any other artifacts, not the crudest club or the simplest hoe, not the wheel or the Atlas rocket, not dance, not music, not even hummed tunes, in fact not tunes at all, not even drumbeats, not rhythm of any kind, not even keeping time with his hands.

Speech, and only speech, gives the human beast the ability to make plans…not just long-term but
any
plans, even for something to do five minutes from now. Speech, and only speech, gives the human beast the power of accurate memory and the means to preserve it in his thoughts for now or indefinitely in print, in photographs, on film, or in the form of engineering and architectural diagrams. Speech, and only speech, enables man to use mathematics. (Doubters need only try to count from one to ten without words.) Speech, and only speech, gives the human beast the power to enlarge his food supply through an artifice called farming. Speech ended not only the evolution of man, by making it no longer necessary for survival, but also the evolution of animals.

Today the so-called animal kingdom is an animal colony, and we own it. It exists only at our sufferance. If we were foolish enough and could get the cooperation of people all over the earth, in six months we could exterminate every animal that sticks up more than a half inch above the ground. Already all cattle, chickens, and sheep in the world and the vast majority of pigs, horses, and turkeys—we hold the whole huge gaggle of them captive,
all
of them…to do with as we wish.

In short, speech, and only speech, has enabled us, we human beasts, to conquer every square inch of land in the world, subjugate every creature big enough to lay eyes on, and eat up half the population of the sea.

And this, the power to conquer the entire planet for our own species, is the minor achievement of speech's great might. The great achievement has been the creation of an internal self, an
ego
. Speech, and only speech, gives man the power to ask questions about his own life—and take his own life. No animal ever commits suicide. Speech, and only speech, gives us the urge to kill others on a massive scale, whether in war or other campaigns of terror. Speech, and only speech, gives us the power to exterminate ourselves and render the planet uninhabitable
just like that
in a matter of thirty-five or forty nuclear minutes. Only speech gives man the power to dream up religions and gods to animate them…and in six extraordinary cases to change history—for centuries—with words alone, without money or political backing. The names of the six are Jesus, Muhammad (whose military power came only after twenty years of preaching), John Calvin, Marx, Freud—and Darwin. And this, rather than any theory, is what makes Darwin the monumental figure that he is.

The human beast does not require that the explanation offer hope. He will believe whatever is convincing. Jesus offered great hope. The last shall be first and the first shall be last. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The meek shall inherit the earth and ascend to the right hand of God. This, from the Sermon on the Mount, is the most radical social and political doctrine ever promulgated. Its soldiers were thousands, millions, of the meek, and it took the better part of three centuries for the Word to build up such a following that the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. Calvin offered less hope than Jesus; Muhammad, more and less; Marx, more and more. The meek—“the proletariat” he called them—shall inherit the earth
now!
…
here!
…and never mind waiting for Heavenly pie in the sky. Freud offered more sex. Darwin offered nothing at all. Each, however, has left an enduring influence.

Jesus is the Rock of Ages for both Marxism and its less vulgar child, Political Correctness in American colleges and universities, today, even though Jesus's latter-day ducklings would gag on the very thought. There was a seventy-two-year-old field experiment in Marxism, 1917–1989, that failed gruesomely. But Marx's idea of one social class dominating another may remain with us forever. In medical terms, Freud is now considered an utter quack and a dotty old professor. But his notion of sex as an energy like the steam in a boiler, which must be released in an orderly fashion or the boiler will blow up, remains with us, too. At this moment, as you gaze upon these pages, you can be sure that there are literally millions of loin spasms and convulsions taking place throughout the world that would not be occurring were it not for the words of Sigmund Freud.

And this, the power of one person to control millions of his fellow humans—for centuries—is a power the Theory of Evolution cannot even begin to account for…or abide. Muhammad's words have enthralled and ruled the daily lives of 35 percent of the people on earth since the eighth century. And that rule has only grown stronger in our time. Jesus's words held sway over a comparable percentage of the world's population for one and a half millennia before weakening in Europe during the last half of the twentieth century.

Words are artifacts, and until man had speech, he couldn't create any other artifacts, whether it was a slingshot or an iPhone or the tango. But speech, the font of all artifacts, had a life no other artifact would ever come close to. You could lay aside a slingshot or an iPhone and forget about it. You could stop dancing the tango and it would vanish forever…or until you deigned to dance again. But you couldn't make speech lie down once it left your lips. The same remark could make your nieces and nephews crack up with mirth and laughter and make your brothers and sisters loathe you forever. Mighty men could say the wrong thing, and tens of thousands of little men might lose their lives in the war that followed right after the words came out of his mouth. Or a weak man might get drunk one night and say something romantic to a pretty girl. He wakes up in the morning with a terrible hangover, kneading his forehead and consumed with guilt because of the sweet possessive looks she's giving him. She has no trouble putting him in a box and tying it with a ribbon and giving him to herself as a wedding gift…the kickoff of sixty-two years during which he has a chance to find out just how stupid she is and how lovely she isn't—all of it the result of a little drunk speech he uttered back in another century.

Soon speech will be recognized as the Fourth Kingdom of Earth. We have
regnum animalia, regnum vegetabile, regnum lapideum
(animal, vegetable, mineral)—and now
regnum loquax,
the kingdom of speech, inhabited solely by
Homo loquax
. Or is “kingdom” too small a word for the eminence of speech, which can do whatever it feels like doing with the other three—physically and in every other way? Should it be Imperium loquax, making speech an empire the equal of Imperium naturae, the empire of Nature? Or Universum loquax, the Spoken Universe…this “superior intelligence,” this “new power of a definite character”?