Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication — but one which in its clumsiness and thickthumbed inadequancy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and guttural signaling.

Down — down — the results can be followed; and all the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man […] could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of chocking mist within which no other but he existed.
Occasionally there were the dim signals from deep within the cavern in which another man was located — so that each might grope toward the other. Yet because they did not know one another, and could not understand one another, […] there was the hunted fear of man for man, the savage rapacity of man toward man […].

Grimly, Man had instinctively sought to circumvent the prison bars of ordinary speech. Semantics, symbolic logic, psychoanalysis — they had all been devices whereby speech could either be refined or bypassed.

Psychohistory had been the development of mental science, the mathematicization thereof, rather, which had finally succeeded.

— Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation.

(ça rejoint ce que je disais là : l’usage de mots à tort et à travers c’est la raison de tous les maux du monde…)

Sinon, je suis en train de reparcourir la série Foundation d’Isaac Asimov. Cette série de livre est un pilier de la science fiction du XXe siècle et il suffit de lire tout ça pour comprendre.

Non seulement l’histoire est bien ficelée, mais elle renferme aussi une immense critique du monde, des sociétés, de la civilisation, en plus de présenter des idées et des astuces pour l’avenir de l’humanité.

C’est une série de bouquins que je recommande fortement à tous.