1. One Mouth, Many Tongues
A language may be compared to a pipe organ, a large complex instrument with many voices, many timbres, many volumes, and for human purposes infinite combinations of sound.

2. You Don’t Say
Linguists have long distinguished among different rhetorics in every language. When speaking with a child, you use one rhetoric. When speaking with your own child, you use another. Different vocabulary, tone, innuendo, gesture, facial expression for your spouse, your companion, your sibling, your boss, your underling, your doctor, and on and on. We are all masters, more or less, of these many sub-languages and switch quickly and skillfully from one to the other through the day.

3. Oopsie-daisie
The various rhetorics can be seen as different manuals, different keyboards on the organ of a language. The total language is the sum of the many keyboards, for none of us is master of all of them. You may have mastered the rhetoric of high-level geology which, when you use it, is all but incomprehensible to the person you pass on the street who has mastered the complex rhetoric of athletic coaching.

4. Thrice Nice Fourfold
The richness and the endurance of a language may be judged by the number of rhetorics in flower at a given time. Of special importance, are those speakers who are capable of using language at its received limits and, magically, or so it seems, pushing it beyond those limits.

Stranded cultures, put upon by time and outrageous fortune, fear
   rightly for their survival and speak if at all with half-paralyzed tongues.

Epigonic cultures worship the past and imitate with a kind of
   simple-minded pleasure, perversely delighted by exploration and
   re-exploration of a linguistic cul de sac.

Hedonic cultures, today called mass or popular, work the surface of
   language, combining and re-combining sounds and surface concepts,
   like children playing with blocks.

Elite cultures decorate themselves with self-defined jargon of interest to
   no one without their privilege and prospects. In life they preen
   themselves and reward each other mightily. In death such jargons enter
   the dustbin of history where they quickly molder and revert to purified
   atoms. The various current dialects of late structuralism,
   post-modernism, etc., for example.

5. Us n Them
In America, as the dominant and richest linguistic entity of the present, all these rhetorics are present and, seemingly, thriving. But as always, inhabitants and practitioners of any ideology, like fish and water, are blind to the glass walls of the fly bottle that encloses them, deaf to the unasked questions which are the victims of any successful, dominant culture.

6. Hush
America, so proud of its freedoms, so naïve about its own chains, so determined to spread both unto all nations, has long been, and continues to be, barbarously unaware of its own smothering system of censorship.

We, who think we can think and say anything without fear of governmental retribution, in the practice of culture do little more than scrawl clever graffiti on the walls of the welcoming marketplace.

The rest, in America, is silence.

7. Still and All
We know from history that, among the large range of human talents there is one that has to do with words. And we know from history that that talent unbridled can produce an effect which in its way is more magical, more moving, more transformative, than any of the technological wonders so valued by the present age. But let any young American human show signs of such a word ability and next thing you know he or she will be shuffled off to the safe, isolating, stifling hothouse of the academy, there to think, to write, to shit, to die.

8. Gulag, Sweet Gulag
So much does America fear its possible word magicians that it in that way, wholly without due process, imprisons them for life. In our vaunted freedom, we let them speak in tiny voices through prison newspapers and chapbooks read by no one except other prisoners and their warders. Thus do we avoid and reject any charge of censorship.

9. I Remember Moma
But so clever is American censorship that even the few words that scintillate even slightly with reflected truth are quickly fed into the maw of the great culture machine, ground up, and quickly regurgitated as so much canon fodder, safe for ingesting by the global fast-food audience.

Some call it art.

10. Tongue-untied
The danger now to the capitalist ideologues, and the great hope for young magicians, is the so-far free access to a world audience through the Internet. The young, who live in hope, know this and for a time gloried in the freedom with their music. Our music, all our musics, past and present.