I love reading debates about the origin of language. The jury’s still out, of course, but some hypotheses are interesting and quite compelling.

It is popularly believed that language must have developed to help groups solve problems.

But there is the idea that language evolved first to help individuals look worth choosing, something coming out of sexual selection, courtship and trait advertising. It may be older, more powerful, and, due to our endless capacity for self-delusion (thank you, Robert Trivers!), falling below the radar.

“Listen to me. Notice my intelligence. Pick me.” That is signalling, in biological terms: communicating traits to others.

As evolutionary history, this remains a hypothesis, but it’s a strong one, one that once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

We communicate information about ourselves alongside whatever we ostensibly discuss. We want to seem open, agreeable, sophisticated and, especially, intelligent. Sometimes we want that impression more than we want to be understood.

There are so many strategies for ‘how to sound intelligent’, but these are the ones I find most conspicuous, and most often, quite annoying, when spotted in others, of course:

Lexical over-abundance. Long sentences accumulate subordinate clauses, instead of parataxis, which places clauses alongside one another.
Longer words. “Utilise” replaces “use”, “commence” replaces “start”. Same meaning, but more intelligent-sounding, the implication being, as before, that a longer, rarer word adds to the advertised IQ.
Scientific-sounding vocab. “Meta”, “per se”, “ad hominem”; alpha, beta, gamma. Most of them ar unnecessary in terms of content, but strategically valuable in signalling terms, like carrying a Trader Joe‘s tote bag in London (where TJ doesn’t operate).
Name-dropping. That’s IQ by association.
Fashionable coinages. There’s a new kid on the block called “net new”, which makes me cringe.
Pleonasms. My favourite: “future plans”, “advance warning”, “added bonus”. “Lived experience”, makes one take a vow of silence.
Prefixes and suffixes. “Operationalisation” instead of “use”; “hyper-personalisation” instead of “tailoring”. More words, not necessarily more thought.
Abstract nouns. “With rapidity” rather than “quickly”. Bring back adverbs, please!
Impersonal terminology. “Human beings” rather than “people”, which goes back to scientific-sounding, illusion of objectivity, etc.

There are others, of course. Our capacity for trait self-advertising,and our need for it, is boundless, and will remain so. But I feel there is a kind of abuse done to language, which I can’t explain.

Peacock talk