Children carbon copied their creators. While the physical outcomes of the genetic wheel of fortune retained a whisper of protean unpredictability, speech and acculturation remained utterly undifferentiated from that of their parents. Glossal guardians, stagnant syntactical statuary. Consummate chips off the old blocks, kids were cultivated colloquial clones.
Initially imbibing milky morphology mutely with teat-stuffed mouths at the mammary, while mum suckles safe words for them. Sat at her knee, bottled blather iterated, infused and introjected. Mounted in the high-chair of babble, being spoon-fed more solid sonant syllables minced and mashed into building brick morphemes. Until the child evidenced an incipient ability to word string sentences for himself. From there on in, the parlance predisposed, perpetually prefigured and impervious to independent importation.
Scions were unable to shuck themselves from their die cast speech stamp. They artlessly echoed the same means of articulation as their extraction. Whatever their emotional bent, which like their physical features could lie anywhere on the continuum provided by the DNA chemical crap shoot, they were devoid of the vocal means for varying its expressive pitch.
The theories of Sigmund Freud darted back for favoured diagnosis, as Oedipal dissonances were played out in the most derisory fashion, since none had the diction to defy the discourse. Juvenile abstractions might fleetingly seem unregimented, but they were soon shunted along tramlines once terminology was brought to bear to transliterate them into tangible thought.
Bilinguals were to some extent immune. For they could slip in and out of their twin vocabularies in any manner of their choosing. Thus was their language uniquely minted beyond predictability. So radical educationalists swept aside the Sciences and even English, in order to place primacy on second languages. But the rote inculcation by lifeless textbooks proffering limp assimilations of Jean-Paul’s first day at school, or Otto writing to his pen-pal, were no less arid than the way adolescents had acceded to their own mother tongues. Fluctuating between two stuttering fluencies furnished them neither felicity nor facility.
Yet a few whippersnappers managed to strike out on discoveries of their own that enabled them to snap their linguistic shackles. They didn’t enter such a course knowingly in a spirit of seeking to expand their verbal palettes, but merely ventured into the neglected libraries- (there were no bookshops anymore) and picked up novels to read. They were swept along the unadulterated imaginations of authors and buoyed by exposure to the words therein which cast them free of their own constricted palates. They envisioned new horizons, disinterred wonderment and evolved the means to encapsulate it in voiced reactions of their own. Then they set to work writing books to liberate the next generations that would come after them.
