At Marginal Revolution Alex Tabarrok takes note of a study which has detected a major change—a decline of “thinking words”, supplanted by “feeling words”:
In texts, both fictional and non-fictional and in English and Spanish, thinking words relating to technology and social organization (experiment, gravity, weigh, cost, contract) become more common between 1850 and approximately 1977 (beginning of the great stagnation) but since then thinking words have declined markedly and feeling words relating to belief, spirituality, sapience, and intuition (e.g. forgiveness, heal, feel) have become more common.
The authors of the study attribute the change to the “failure of ‘neo-liberalism'” while Alex suggests that the women’s movement and the feminization of American culture might be a factor as well. I would suggest the following:
- Visualcy. When people stopped getting most of their news from newspapers and started getting it from television (now online). Visual media promote more agonistic modes of expression.
- The ascendancy of postmodernism in American tertiary education. The early 70s was the period of greatest influence of figures like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
Thinking words accompanied the industrial growth of the world, especially the US. Since about 1980 we have financialized and added tons of new media. Easier to fill that up with feelings.
Steve