Observation made this past week

"Just as in the secular world, as the generations go on, our mastery over the written word decreases, while the number of people who can read increases, In Judaism, as the generations go on, our mastery of the knowledge of Judaism decreases, as the number of Jews who can learn increases. "

This is my claim.

Normaly people just say, the further away you are from an event the more jumbled up it gets, but I could never wrap my mind around that one in Judaism. Because in Judaism we tend to be very picky about giving sources for what we teach others, and we are very picky about the way the Torah is written. No other book has so few discrepancies for being so old pre printing press.

I made this discovery while listening to my CD, All the Kings Men. The language is very poetic, and it took me a few days to be able to wrap my head around the language. In some ways its like listening to an opera where the words are distorted, however in this case, it just more "refined" english. I realized this fact even more, when in the book, they start quoting a fictional diary from the 1850s. That language was even more refined, and as ATKM put it, " it was not the way they spoke, but a more proper, a schoolgirl proper way of writing, as if trying to impress her teachers"

I compare Chaucer to Orwel, and its two different levels. Even on NPR I once heard someone lament that its rare to find well written book these days.

Since I believe that language is the uniquly Human thing about us, especially written lanuage, and I believe its the method for the Infinite Divine to interact with the world (maybe I'll explain how Language is infinite, despite the finite number of words we have, another time) It only makes perfect sense to me, that as we get further away from our divine soures, our language decays as well.

Perhaps in the next few years we will see a revival in "good writing." I am sure that if this happens, it will be atributed as a backlash to the decay of writing on the Internet, with words such as IC and U, and BRB, but I have a feeling it will also coincide with more signs of the "Messianic age"


Now the one chink in my theory, and its due to ignorance of fact, so I don't see it as discreting my thoery, is that it seems, there was a certain point where langauge was very crude and not so refined, before the emergence of Shakespear and Chaucer. But perhaps I am wrong on this, I don't know of any english works from before that time off the top of my head.