Our Public Lexicon Is Changing

IN HIS FOUR QUARTETS, T. S. ELIOT reminds us that, “Last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice.”For some time now, Google, through what they term “Ngram Viewer,” has been running an interesting research experiment on the words we all use, and examining that vocabulary to draw some interesting conclusions on how we are changing.By measuring word usage across all forms of media, including books and pamphlets going back years, Google has learned that we are becoming a much more highly individualized people. There has been a sharp increase in the words “self” and “personalized,” and a corresponding decrease in words like “share,” “united,” and “common good.” Words dealing with the field of business and economics have mushroomed, while terms dealing with morality and personal character have declined over the course of the last few decades. Use of the word “bravery” has declined by 66% in that time. “Gratitude” is down 49%. “Humility is down 52%, while “kindness” has declined 56%.  These figures are telling us something.What does all this mean? We aren’t sure, but for certain there is a kind of seismic shift underway in our public language. While we regard ourselves as more empathetic than previous generations, we are, at the same time, much more into ourselves – the larger world still exists and influences us, but we are increasingly interested in those things immediately around us. This has an effect on everything from community life to international understanding.Increasingly we are forming a kind of counter-culture that rejects institutions in favour of those influences that affect our near surroundings. In a very real sense we are in the process of streamlining our lives so as to shape them to aerodynamically deflect those things that no longer seem relevant to us, or our personal journeys. In the parlance of social media, self has become more about status as opposed to the older pursuit of character.What else should we expect in a world in which Uber has become the largest taxi company on the planet, though it owns no cars, and Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company, even without any properties? In essence, these are apps connecting us to resources as opposed to resources themselves, and in the process they have made their developers billions of dollars.Previous generations – indeed history itself – maintained that our main possession was our personal character. As such it was easily transportable and you could refine it whether you were rich or poor, man or woman, from the developed or developing world. Institutions were important in such an outlook because, as within the education system itself, that inner “us” took years to grow and become established. And for that to work, we required others – not just friends or associates, but mentors, moral and ethical guides, older family members – if we were to make a good job of it.If Google is correct in its analysis, we are largely casting off such historic resources in favour of experimentation and going it alone. There is some merit in that evolution. We target racism, gender bias, and economic inequality as harmful to progress, at times with a diligence unseen in previous generations. Yet at the same time we experience more difficulty in spotting the flaws in ourselves. While more astute at zeroing in on mistakes in systems and in other individuals, we are nevertheless reticent to realize how our mistakes or blind individuality have affected others.Our culture is changing – for better and for worse. As essayist Joseph Epstein relayed to some students, when he was young and went to the drugstore, cigarettes were out in the open and condoms were hidden behind the counter. Now it’s the other way around. Values are shifting and people are shifting along with them. As citizens, this should be a transformation of vital interest to us.In his famous, perhaps infamous, 1984, George Orwell observed, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” We must ensure that our public language – that of the public space – retains a strong element of “others” and support of those institutions which keep us in contact with greater society and thus with ourselves. In an age when citizens have more opportunity to shape their respective societies than at any other time in history, it would be a tragedy if we harboured a vocabulary too small for our greatest collective aspirations.