Continuing the theme from yesterday…
In “Idiocracy”, when Luke Wilson, with his IQ of 100 (which in the future makes him a genius) speaks in fully formed sentences, the local populace finds it completely bizarre — in fact they laugh at him, finding him effete. I’ve been thinking about how one might convey the equivalent encounter, should people from an alternate reality where the average IQ is 200+ enter a society where the average IQ is 100.
We’re talking about a race of people who could do the NY Times Saturday crossword puzzle in their heads, or glance at stock market listings and then find it obvious where to invest. So it would make sense that their cultural norm of speech would incorporate linguistic challenges that they would find easy, but which would require much effort on our part to keep up with.
Here’s one possibility: Our visitors, in their native dialect, always speak in perfectly formed iambic pentameter rhyming couplets. Of course when such people encounter us, with our barbarically chaotic speech patterns, they could learn to mimic our grammar, but they would undoubtedly find such speech as distasteful as the grunting of an early human.
Such visitors, on first arriving, might attempt to speak to us in their native dialect. The result might be something like this:
| Native: | “Welcome to Burger King. How can I help you?” | |
| Visitor: | “I thank you for your courtesy today. What food is here that we can take away?” | |
| Native: | “Come again?” | |
| Visitor: | “Certainly we’ll come again quite soon. But can’t we order now, it’s nearly noon?” |
Things aren’t likely to go well for this visitor. In fact, you can well imagine our bemused native getting a serious case of the giggles.
I much prefer blank verse for daily speech.
Our hero’s rhyming couplets can get dull.
but If you must insist on rhyme, how about
an enjambment or two for tossing out.
I guess “Kate and Leopold” might be
Another example for sophisticated
Speech we lost… and keep loosing..
To think that all this time Hugh Jackman was the savior of civilization, and we didn’t even know it. How could we have missed the signs????
um, cause we were looking at our smart phones? 😉
There is a rich literature of this sort of thing in Science Fiction. Most prominent would be the novel Brain Wave by Paul Anderson (1953) in which the Earth passes out of the intelligence-reducing region of space it has been in for many millions of years. However this does not explore the “delightful word play” aspect you’re discussing. I believe that was best done by Robert Silverberg, where a person of normal intelligence and abilities thrust into a society of super-intelligent people is a recurring theme. In one story a woman tries to keep up with some word game her new housemates (who don’t yet realize she is not super intelligent instead assuming she is shy and tongue-tied) are playing, and as a reader you can get only a glimmer of the sophistication of the word smithing. Silverberg does it very well.
@Lev: Cry havoc! and lose the dogs of war 😀