ABSTRACT
For in the other powers which we possess . . . we are in no respect superior to other living creatures; nay, we are inferior to many in swiftness and in strength and in other resources; but, because there has been planted in us the
{Antidosisy 253-7)
Such ideas obviously have particular force and relevance in societies where the act of talking, face to face, constitutes the fundamental mode of life and where speech seems not only to embody humanity, but to bring into being and reinforce all the communal social structures o f‘civilization’ . In such societies speech and man, language and culture, talking and ‘way of life’ must be very closely connected.
