I have been reading and studying Studies in Words by C. S. Lewis1 since 1991. Over time, it has become a personal classic, not a book I merely consult, but one I return to as language, culture, and education continue to change around us.
Lewis was not proposing a theory of linguistics. He was diagnosing a cultural disorder: the erosion of meaning when words are stretched, moralized, inflated, or detached from lived reality, a process he famously called verbicide.
In the chapter “At the Fringe of Language,” he examines the intrinsic limits of language itself, showing where words decline and where wisdom requires restraint, imagination, or even silence. Certain forms of expression operate at this frontier, reaching meaning precisely where literal explanation begins to fail.
Language naturally evolves. Cultural shifts, political pressures, religious transformations, and generational change all shape vocabulary. This organic development is typically slow, contested, and grounded in experience, renewing language by returning words to rhythm, image, and embodied understanding.
What distinguishes the present moment is not change itself, but speed and scale. In the age of large language models and AI-generated text, linguistic transformation accelerates beyond human rhythms, giving these reflections renewed urgency. When language is generated statistically rather than formed through experience, it risks retaining form while losing necessity.
Language advances sequentially and struggles to capture realities that are simultaneous, spatial, or dynamic. AI-generated language intensifies this linearity while presenting itself as comprehensive and authoritative. Words that once answered to reality increasingly respond to probability, meaning shifts from truth to statistical coherence.
Emotion in language remains legitimate, yet when ease of expression replaces significance, insight disappears. Under scale and computerization, accuracy corrodes, moral weight weakens, and plausibility replaces reference.
The question that remains is whether language and literature more broadly will continue to develop as a human, cultural, and moral achievement, or whether it will be reshaped, and perhaps disfigured, by systems optimized for efficiency rather than common sense, and by processes no longer anchored in the human mind.
The Dutch philosopher Henk van Riessen once said, “I only know what I think when I hear what I say,” reminding us that thought becomes clear only through articulation. C. S. Lewis, approaching the same truth from a different angle, warned that “Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.”2 Together, these insights reveal a fragile but essential bond between language and reason: speech does not merely express thought, it shapes and sustains it.
Lewis’s point is not merely linguistic, but anthropological and moral. When words lose their exactness, depth, and attachment to lived reality, thought begins to weaken. The danger is not only that language becomes vague, but that certain forms of understanding quietly disappear because the words capable of carrying them have been emptied or changed.
In returning to Studies in Words and other classics, we rediscover a language formed by reflection, silence, patience, and lived necessity, qualities no algorithm can imitate. AI may be a good servant, but it should never become a master.
Paulo Ribeiro is an IEEE PES Distinguished Lecturer and professor of electrical engineering at the Federal University of Itajubá, Brazil.
1 Comment
Richard Gunton · March 2, 2026 at 10:42 pm
Paulo has sent this as a follow-up to his post:
“From a Reformational perspective, particularly that of Herman Dooyeweerd, language is a creational ordered human activity operating across irreducible modal aspects of reality. It is not merely analytical or technical, but historically shaped, socially embedded, ethically qualified, and ultimately trust-oriented, directed toward truthfulness and responsibility.
“When language is reduced to statistical performance or instrumental efficiency, its normative dimensions are detached from their coherence with earlier ones, resulting in what Dooyeweerd described as the absolutization of the logical–analytical aspect.
“Sphere sovereignty further clarifies that language belongs to the cultural–lingual sphere and must not be governed by the technical or economic logic of machines. Artificial intelligence may operate powerfully within limited aspects of reality, but it lacks normative accountability. The central risk, therefore, is not that machines generate language, but that humans relinquish their responsibility to steward language faithfully within a law-structured reality whose meaning cannot be computed, only responsibly articulated.”