Judge — January 22, 1916 — page 4: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

E D Misunderstandings OO MANY languages are spoken. They confuse mankind and put it back toward the Tower of Babel at confounded period is almost revived in our midst, and we have no use for its recrudescence. “I get you, Steve,” while generally spoken in jest, is also spoken falsely; the fact be- ing that nobody really gets “Steve” as to his precise meaning. He cannot put it into terms that mean to us what they mean to him. In a word, we speak differ- ent tongues. Take college professors, an example— do they understand each other? Certainly not. Listen to their different display of the same subjects when the public sits up to be enlightened. To all intents and purpo: they might represent conflicting r, spite of their supposed fraternal relations as one faculty of educators. And politicians—do they employ a stand- ard vernacular? Hardly. One harps on virtue, with words meaning something; another on vice, with words meaning noth- ing; a third on party standards, with words meaning anything; and & fourth on pros- perity, with words meaning very little of everything. “Nary wan o’ thim” knows what the others are talking about. Each has his chosen lingo, and the resulting oratory amounts to one of two things: a very agreeable noise or an extremely dis agreeable rumpus No help is in sight for this sort of thing, and we are bound to go on suffering indefi nitely. There is nobody versatile enough to think and talk and hear in several dialects all at the same time. It can't be done. Hence, common parlance must be stand- ardized. One would be a superior being if he or she might listen comprehendingly to the children, their nurse, the butler, chauffeur, maids, tradesmen, modiste, tailor, express- man, stockbroker, rector, orator, and the newspapers all in one day! The suggested assortment of verbiage is confusion to think of. One plain ordinary brain is quite unequal to it N VIEW of the uplifters to right of us, uplifters to left of us, uplifters behind us, uplifters beneath us and uplifters on top of us, pulling and hauling, it is impossible to doubt that we are higher in the ethical scale than we were. But what is that scale? It is the great weakness of moral dynamics and kinetics that they still await a Newton and a Watt and a Galileo to discover their exact laws. For instance, someone should fix upon the ethical zero, or dead level of savagery. From there, if we had a moral barometer, we could determine our moral altitude or, with an ethical thermometer, our ethical temperature Until we get these things, uplifting must remain an inexact science. Until we can measure deontological foot-pounds and tabulate the specific gravity, the atomic weight, the chemical formulx, the density and other facts concerning aretological units, we must still remain in the more or less dark, never quite certain whether a given uplifter is really lifting up or pulling down I" The Test S the things a man could do but does not which stamp him as incompetent comicbooks.com