Words are the fuel of courtship. Other species win their mates through a series of escalating dances, but humans use conversation.
Geoffrey Miller, an American evolutionary psychologist, notes that most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. And yet the most frequent one hundred words account for 60 percent of all conversations. Why do humans bother knowing those extra fifty-nine thousand nine hundred words?
So they can more effectively sort through and impress potential mates, says Miller. He calculates that if a couple speaks for two hours a day, and utters on average three words a second, and has sex for three months before conceiving a child (which would have been the norm on the prehistoric savanna), then a couple will have exchanged about a million words before conceiving a child.
That’s a lot of words, and plenty of opportunity for one of them to get offended, bored, or annoyed by the other. It’s also ample enough time to fight, make up, explore and reform. And it is long enough for them to stay together to raise a child, which is crucial since a single woman in a prehistoric environment could not gather enough calories to support herself and her offspring.
The logic of this is astonishing. Basically, Miller is saying that we are creatures biologically wired to:
1. Use language to impress potential mates.
2. Use the language of potential mates to eliminate them as contenders.
3. Use language to entertain so that men and women stay together during vulnerable pregnancies and birth.
4. Use language, therefore, to ensure the survival of the species.
The implications of this are even more astounding. If language is designed to help us pick partners, exclude those who are unsuitable, and then serve as the glue to create the future, I venture to say that our use of language, in all its forms, is the most important skill we can ever have.
We get jobs based on how we talk–how well we use words to make fine distinctions. We keep jobs the same way. And the business cultures we build, and the products and services we create, are generated by words…by the awesome, generative power of language.
Our careers depend on it. Apparently, our marriages depend on it. Our children will depend on it. And the survival of the human race depends on it.
I am language. My hands are on the wheel. My foot is on the gas. There are no brakes. Where do you want to go?