Thinking about an idea I remember reading in Owen Barfield's Poetic Diction, about a kind of connection between a kid's use of language and the way the ancients used lanaguage; where words encompass broad meanings before any kind of differentiation or abstraction.

What follows is a very rough and somewhat unfinished stream of thoughts so feel free to chime in if any of thus sparks something in you. Hopefully this does add something useful to your thoughtlife.

So. For the kid, a word is all about direct apprehension, such that room is left for smaller units of meaning and articulated understanding to emerge later. In short, children, like the ancients, are not fully aware that they might be speaking poetically even when they are.

Recently my 6yo found herself in the midst of a crowd of kids and she later told me that she felt “crowdy”. She meant something like “overwhelmed” but the feeling was so tied to the experience of a crowd that “crowdy” was the perfect word. Poetic, yes, but not meant as poetry.

Anyway this has go me thinking about electronic media, how as a medium it tends to blend meanings such that the poetic returns but without the awareness of the poetic/metaphorical. There's a trend online for everything to be taken almost psychotically literally.

This has a fun side to it, of course. But there's a bit of a dark side to it too. On the dark side, we have crazy ideas interpreted as if absolutely unquestionable, such as we find in so many conspiracy theories. It's also difficult to distinguish between true news and fake news.

On the fun side, we have words like "cringe" or "based" or "cope" which are not so easily differentiatable or definable. They're all about direct experience. That or this thing *is* cringe or based or cope because that's how it feels. Sounds like poetry to me.

Which all gets me thinking about how electronic media, maybe unconsciously, infantalises us. Note the spreading bureaucracies and cancelling! Only kids like so many rules. No wonder whole theories have exploded in the humanities with jargon that means nothing really.

I guess this is nothing new, though. McLuhan warned us about postliteracy and here we are, with books and history feared so much that they must be burned and torn down. But it's got me thinking more about how postliteracy is about losing maturity as well as definition.

The digital is all about data and information, not knowledge or wisdom. We have facts, but barely any handle on truth.

Anyway, I'll end here. Those are my thoughts for now. I hope you've found them vaguely interesting.