Page:Carl Sandburg - You and Your Job (1910).pdf/6

6 saying, "Please pass the butter," you would ejaculate "Umph," and let it go at that. The average man in our civilization has about fifteen hundred words at his tongue's end for emergencies. The latest and completest dictionary has more than 200,000 words. All these words have grown by the efforts of thousands of generations of men and women and children trying to make themselves understand each other better. Language is a social product, and so are many other things, In fact, it would be hard to find a thing that was purely and unadulteratedly an individual product.

I've been reading some history lately. I don't believe all I read—I wouldn't swear to everything I see in type—but I believe what looks true and reasonable. And I learn that there is good proof that at one time men could not write. The reason they could not write was that there was no alphabet to write with. At one period men had a clumsy way of making records by pictures, but they were worse pictures, Bill, than we used to draw when we were in short pants studying the First Reader. But slowly, little by little, the alphabet came. The men with high brows and microscopes can't find the date it was invented—it grew—it was evolved. Piece by piece, through changes and experiments, we got the alphabet, and so it was with the printing press, and so with the steam engine. A modern locomotive of the latest model is said to represent ideas contributed by more than eleven thousand men. The first hairy, primeval creature who carved