Something about this reminded me of Richard Feynman’s experiences when he was taught to draw and paint
‘I noticed that the teacher didn’t tell people much (the only thing he told me was my picture was too small on the page). Instead, he tried to inspire us to experiment with new approaches. I thought of how we teach physics: We have so many techniques—so many mathematical methods—that we never stop telling the students how to do things.
‘On the other hand, the drawing teacher is afraid to tell you anything. If your lines are very heavy, the teacher can’t say, “Your lines are too heavy.” because some artist has figured out a way of making great pictures using heavy lines. The teacher doesn’t want to push you in some particular direction.
‘So the drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.’
It was homage to Wolcott Gibbs’ classic takedown of Timespeak in his New Yorker article about Henry Luce.
Hadden gave Time its signature features: a kind of collegiate wiseguy prose that involved the creation or popularization of new words (such as “cinemactor” and “tycoonery”) and the reversal of sentence structure, with verb first and noun following: “Backward ran the sentences until the mind reeled.” A parody of “Timespeak” by the New Yorker columnist Wolcott Gibbs in 1936 angered Luce. Gibbs’s Luce is an
ambitious, gimlet-eyed Baby Tycoon . . . Stutters in conversation, [never in speech] . . . Certainly to be taken with seriousness is Luce at thirty-eight, his fellowman already informed up to his ears, the shadow of his enterprise long across the land, his future plans impossible to contemplate. Where it will all end, knows God.
Maddeningly, the article gets one of Gibbs’ gibes wrong. (And, dammit, I also smudged his line.) He actually wrote "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.” And it leaves out the “never in speech” which was so apt that the Time review of a posthumous edition of Gibbs’ collected works cited it in tribute.
“Angered”? Luce was incandescent with rage at the piece, yet quietly started the process of replacing it with normal sentences. The article, “Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce,” Nov. 28, 1936, still can be read as a magnificent work of journalistic art, even without knowing the 1936 version of Time. If one is looking for a master of language to emulate, one could try Gibbs. One will fail, of course.
Indonesian and Malay come to mind. They are largely mutually intelligible, although more so in their formal varieties than in the more colloquial usages. The same applies to Urdu and Hindi, I think. Moreover, I’ve personally witnessed a Spaniard and an Italian managing to communicate quite well in their respective languages, and a Portuguese acquaintance once told me that she had very little trouble understanding Spanish, although she had never studied it.
That’s because, based purely on raw data, the difference between varieties of the same language is continuous rather than discrete. The difference between a language and a dialect is more of a socio-political contruct than a linguistic fact.