this is the essay of george steiner. he's talking about the loss of language that has happened to us over the last, you know, 50 odd years with the incoming of the television media, internet. the true catastrophe of babble is not the scattering of tongues, it is the reduction of human speech to a handful of planetary, multi-national tongues. anglo american standardized vocabularies, grammar shaped by military technocratic megalow mania and the imperatives of greed which is the voice of money talking of money in the voice that toni morrison, when she accepted the nobel prize in literature in 1993, denominated as the language that creates blood -- that drinks blood. happy to admire its own paralysis, possessed of no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of narcotic and narcissism. dumb, predatory, sentimental. exciting reverence in school children, providing a shelter for despots. language designed to preserve privilege and that, to me, is the language of scientists. and talk about capitalism. talk about