Continuing the theme from yesterday…<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Such visitors, on first arriving, might attempt to speak to us in their native dialect. The result might be something like this:<\/p>\n