The past is becoming a foreign language

Full video:

My wife got me into reading classical books a few years ago. The first 5 or so old books were difficult, but after that I started to prefer old classics to new books. Just finished Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle.

Nice!! I haven’t read that yet. But yes the classics are much higher quality in every way than what we have now

Catholic schools and Aquinas were inspired by it. If you went to Catholic school, then you may have already been taught its principals.

Please hurry up and become a Professor. The academic world needs you. It’s clear you love this. Teach and you learn even more and have purpose for the knowledge that will last and change lives. Any school anywhere. The experience will be good.

Thank you Tim! Very kind of you to say!

I know that great things are coming for you. You are making a positive impact in the world. 🌎 I really want to see you succeed. I first started teaching because someone asked me to, not because I decided to but I accepted and it’s made a huge difference. I think you would like it and I know you would be great.

As a Boomer with a high school education, I do not consider myself "a very well-educated person". But I did know the meaning of around 50% of the words listed; and could reasonably guess the meaning of another 20%. Good thing I didn't go into higher education.

Nice!! Apparently those with higher education had the biggest loss in vocabulary

Should add that the high school I attended in the early 60's was a Jesuit one... so Latin and Greek helped. But the rest of the 60's was a blur, dude...

I did the exact same thing with Rudyard Kipling in regards to keeping a list of words I didn't know, it feels great to see those words now and know what they mean. Victorian English is one of the most beautiful things in Creation in my opinion. Old books really are the best!

Awesome. Its the best!

This is a tremendous video. Great work!

Thank you!

Kudos.. you nailed it.. and that’s exactly why we must preserve our national legacies .. because it’s our future

Great word. Goes very well with mellifluous.

Shakespeare wrote when English had between 20 to 30,000 words it has over 1 million now, just saying

interesting!

@privateparks Lotta people talking without speaking.

@thewaronbeauty My girlfriend broke up with me because I said “that’s hella bella” perhaps it was justified, but did she really need to take my pride too?

Orwell was a Genius. Great video

Post-modernists mischaracterize reading as just a means of information transfer. The suggestion is that if we come up with a simpler manner of transferring information, then that is preferable. That is the justification for Orwellian Newspeak. In truth, reading is about enriching the soul, which is seldom accomplished in a linear and prosaic way. This works against the aim of the post-modernist deconstructionist, hence the practice of dumbing down our education at all levels.

"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words." "The revolution will be complete when the language is perfect." "It's an encouraging thought that by 2050 not a single person will be able to have a conversation like this."

Very sad 💔

This was done intentionally.

This is absolutely, positively a fantastic insight, and I’m so glad you shared it.

Excellent video, I love this. At minimum can we start by removing "Bro" as the natural lead-in to a conversation these days? We're literally living Idiocracy in realtime. The question should be asked by any modern person, why we tend to default to our base, simple, easy natures, rather than rise to our difficult, virtuous, enriching noble potential?

If u legit found those authors nigh-impossible & ‘effete’ foreign, prep school + USC are no longer meaningful signifiers. That’s AP lvl curricula

Great post. This is why it's important to find good, older children's literature, too. Books written at least 80 years ago. Exposing your kids to that cadence and vocabulary helps them ease into even older books as they grow.

This might be my favorite X post ever. The only thing I would add is that the same is true for reading and writing in cursive. Many of our most important original documents were handwritten in cursive. How would you know if the printed version is correct if you cannot read the original?

I love reading. Starting in second grade, every time I came across a word I didn't know, I would look it up and try to use it in conversation. Old books have a depth of expression unknown in modern literature.

I counter the decline of linguistic knowledge by shmaking up my own words.

Progressivists love to tell us that the modern mind has 'outgrown' those long, winding sentences of our ancestors. It’s a bit like a man bragging that his lungs have outgrown the need for deep breaths of fresh air. By training us to only read things that can fit on a billboard or get squeezed into a quick headline, they’ve pulled off a brilliant trick. They’ve made sure we can never grasp any truth that takes more than ten seconds of patience. Honestly, it’s the ultimate victory for the power that be, they don't even have to hide the truth anymore; they just have to make it too long for anyone to bother reading.

You are doing *VITAL* work, Julia! You are a contemporary “Lady Godiva” (with clothes on!) who is on a noble mission to preserve and appreciate both culture and heritage. I, for one, deeply admire and applaud what you are doing. Best wishes, Kenny, Keswick, Lake District, UK. 🙏

You've popped up on my You tube timeline, I passed over your video even though I was curious. Just subscribed 👌

Thank you🙏

The dumbing down of America. Here is a 1912 Eighth Grade Examination. If you can't view it all, here is a link to it: How many can you answer?

Have you considered that you might just be stupid?

Have you ever read The Evidential Power of Beauty, by Fr Thomas Dubay? You'd love it.

No but I think it’s on my TBR!

Al throughout primary and secondary school, I had an exercise book. It was filled with words. I read voraciously and would write down words that I didn’t understand and then found out the meaning of those words later. Next to the word, I would create a sentence to use that word. All that fell away in forms 5 and 6. I still knew probably more words than anyone in my entire class. Makes me think I should start again.

A strong foundation is Latin is impertive (Greek is helpful too). I also recommend physcially writing words and their definitions to commit them to longterm memory. The value of comprehension is measured in ones ability to communicate an easily understandable explanation.

I looked at the word list. To be fair a significant part of it is very specific to philosophy books and can be considered "technical vocabulary".

This is how our Presidents used to speak to us -- with the full expectation that every listener would either immediately understand, or be able to functionally approach dissecting the words to use prefix/root word/suffix definitions and etymologies to understand what's said. The "societal issue" is that our education system has been softened and feminized to the point where how you FEEL about your ability to read and process information is more important than your actually ability to do so.

1:22 "my younger brother husband" ?

My younger brother Hudson

I hear Christopher Nolan’s movie 🎬 of Homer’s “The Odyssey” is apparently written in colloquial, “modern English”, meaning 💩🧠 simplistically. Also, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Homer, G. Orwell nor Aldous Huxley spoke 🗣️ Ebonics. So, give a blakc-assed Nigga’ ✊🏿 his due props! 🫵🏻😜

There is a book about it.

read/watch The Adventures of English by Melvin Bragg. It goes into how modern english evolved. words and their meaning shift/evolve. I get what you're saying and I agree- we are being dumbed down, but its also a factor of influence, culture, and location that has caused english to change and shift from useage so much so that words that were common 100 years ago aren't in use now. Its a really cool look a the influence of religion, dictionaries, politics, etc on our language