In C.S. Lewis' great adventure The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, he describes Eustace, the obnoxious cousin of the Pevensie children, with these words: “He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools."
When Eustace comes face-to-face with a dragon, Lewis says, "Edmund or Lucy or you would have recognized it at once, but Eustace had read none of the right books." Eustace did not have the vocabulary with which to make sense of his experience, much less to meet the challenge.
Poverty-stricken vocabulary
Gladys Hunt uses an expression that captures Eustace's terrible situation.
Somehow a limited, poverty-stricken vocabulary works toward equally limited use of ideas and imagination. On the other hand, the provocative use of the right words, of a growing vocabulary, gives us adequate material with which to clothe our thoughts and leads us to a richer world of expression. (Honey for a Child's Heart p18)What is truly remarkable is that there is no connection whatsoever between "poverty-stricken vocabulary" and material poverty, or even formal education. I have met investment bankers who are phenomenally powerful and wealthy, of whom "poverty-stricken vocabulary" would be not only accurate, but a merciful description of their habits of speech. By contrast, John Bunyan, the author of The Pilgrim's Progress, was a master of language who completed only a few years of formal schooling. His epic tale has been translated into 200 languages, and has never been out of print in the last 300 years.
Implications for parents
This means that parents of all ethnic, social, and economic groups can nurture a language-rich home environment in which children treasure a word fitly spoken, and find language with which to clothe their own thoughts. To suggest otherwise would imply some sort of racism or classism. "Truth and excellence have a way of springing up all over the world, and our role as parents is to teach our children how to find and enjoy the good nad to reject what is mediocre and unworthy." (ibid.)
