A new era was emerging that spoke in the language of what Shakespeare called "cool reason." As Professor Croll has just shown, the advocates of the severe style themselves were soon liable to verbal pomp. Of this stile coupé Professor Croll wrote: The period consists, as some of its admirers were wont to say, of the nerves and muscles of speech alone; it is as hard bitten, as free of soft or superfluous flesh, as one of Caeser’s soldiers.

"You don’t know anything about a person until you’ve heard them speak aloud, even if the speech is strained or stammering, even if unintelligibility is its dominant characteristic, even if the manner is so eloquent it negates itself and amounts to nonsense. The most abhorrent speakers are the smug ones, the most endearing speak in tongues. Future is both, and so the future is, sure of itself, proud of its shambles."

And in moments of total darkness, when even this structure dissolves, there persists somewhere in the limbic basement of the brain the rhythm of language, its cadence and flow, the dialect of pure sound we babbled as infants and grunted to one another on the savannah before symbols fell from the sky.