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The Death of Language: Why Fewer Words Mean Fewer Thoughts

How Linguistic Decay is Killing Critical Thinking, One Word at a Time

Alain Suppini
4 min readFeb 10, 2025
Photo by Sven Brandsma on Unsplash

The Silent Decline of Thought

Language is shrinking. Words vanish, grammar erodes, and with them, our ability to think critically. The disappearance of tenses — subjunctive, past perfect, conditional — limits our perception of time. The rise of casual speech, the erosion of punctuation, and the rejection of complexity are not mere trends; they are the symptoms of a deeper crisis: the decline of human thought.

We live in an age where brevity is mistaken for efficiency and simplification for progress. But what happens when simplification turns into dilution? The answer is clear: a diminished ability to reason, analyze, and express nuanced ideas. If thought is built upon language, then a weakening language leads to weaker thoughts.

When Simplicity Becomes Stupidity

Language shapes thought. A rich vocabulary allows nuanced expression; a limited one reduces communication to blunt impulses. The more we strip language down, the more we strip down thought itself. Orwell warned us in 1984: control language, and you control minds. Today, it’s not Big Brother wielding linguistic chains; it’s a…

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Alain Suppini
Alain Suppini

Written by Alain Suppini

Anesthesiologist and Intensive Care Physician passionate about Holistic Medicine and Well-Being.

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