Language on Your Back

       Reading about language today made me recall Jonathan Swift and "Gulliver's Travels" in the land of Laputa.

       Gulliver found that professors there abolished all words, saving breath, lungs, and time.  Why?   "[S]ince words are only names for things," people would carry things with them such as "were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on."

       The more you had to say, the more you carried.  Gulliver writes he'd often seen two Laputans "sinking under the weight of their packs...who when they met in the streets would lay down their loads, open their sacks and hold conversation for an hour together; then... help each other to resume their burthens, and take their leave."

       In the interest of health and brevity, I can't see why we don't abolish all words here too.