A report in Perspectives on Psychological Science last April said that people are each speaking about 120,000 fewer words every year. That’s a cumulative loss of 1.8 million spoken words over five years. If this is correct – we are talking less. Conversation is dying. The word ‘talk’ appears in English around 1225, and comes from a Germanic source verb ‘to tale’. At that time ‘tale’ did not mean (as it does today) a fictional story, instead it was closer to the (related) word ‘tally’ which meant ‘to reckon, to number, to enumerate’ – something that was done out loud and shared with others. Over time it took on the ‘-lk’ ending in parallel with words such as ‘walk’. So, why is our talk dying? Surely it’s largely because of technology. We’ve all seen couples (or whole families) sitting together in a public place (a restaurant, an airport) where all of them are glued to the small screens on their phones, and not talking to each other. Texting has largely replaced emails. Self-checkout at the supermarket means we no longer exchange small talk with the checkout person. I am told that in workplaces colleagues who sit within earshot of each other now exchange emails rather than just turn around and talk. For those of us who love words and language, this is nothing less than a tragedy. Without talk relationships wither and die. And relationships are the currency of the universe. Without relationships humanity dies. So, fight the trend! Take every opportunity to talk – talk to anyone, anywhere, any time! I talk to strangers in lifts and at bus stops. We need to be the brigade that fights the loss of language – the loss of conversation. Small talk is better than no talk. You know what needs to be done – so go and do it!

A Speccie reader (Joe) asked me about the word ‘gubernatorial.’ It relates to a ‘governor’ (that’s what the word means) or to governorship or an election for the position of governor. As the Oxford observes this is ‘originally and chiefly American’ – and it’s certainly not a word we would be likely to use in Australia. It comes from the classical Latin word gubernātor which meant a ruler or governor. The Americans seem to have a liking for highly Latinate words for some reason (perhaps it makes them sound more important). The result is that any electoral race for the governorship of any American state is bound to be referred to (in the American media) as a ‘gubernatorial race’. There will be a number of these ‘gubernatorial races’ happening during the mid-term elections in the US in November of this year. And one of these ‘gubernatorial elections’ is a bit unusual. Oregon has an unconventional candidate who goes by the name Pencil. He campaigns in a bright yellow pencil costume. He is running as a write-in candidate to draw attention to the state’s education crisis. Pencil has made Oregon’s low fourth-grade literacy rate a central focus of his campaign. There used to be a similarly colourful candidate who ran in Australian senate elections under the name of ‘Ivor F’ (just a final initial, no surname) and he ran on a platform of spelling reform. Britain also had a perennial parliamentary candidate called Screaming Lord Sutch (David Sutch, 1940-1999, founder of the Monster Raving Loony Party (not to be confused with the Labor Party – despite any perceived similarities!)