IN HIS 1979 ESSAY “STANDING BY WORDS,” the plainspoken farmer, poet, novelist, and essayist from Kentucky, Wendell Berry, declared that there are “two epidemic illnesses in our time—upon both of which virtual industries of cures have been founded”: “the disintegration of communities and the disintegration of persons.”1 That seems obvious enough. But Berry’s next claim is deeper and, if true, more disturbing: “What seems not so well understood, because not so much examined, is the relation between these disintegrations and the disintegration of language.”2
