OK, But I'll also point out to my prof friend that, given the lightning speed with which slang changes, citing a 1992 book in 2006 might not make for a strong argument. For what it's worth, my laptop's new dictionary says a ditz is "somebody considered to be silly in a scatterbrained sort of way." Male or female, it would seem. At root, my own ditzy mistake was to put "blonde" next to "ditz." That suggested a stereotype. That's what brought the roof down.

Enough! The issue's good result is that I've been thinking more about language. Long ago, when the earth was still cooling, I used to earn my keep by pontificating about it. And now ideas from way back then are bubbling up, ideas long since pre-empted by more useful farm facts. Like how to use a pig's length and a multiple of its girth to estimate its weight, or how to pinpoint the one hen among many who isn't pulling her weight and laying an egg a day.

Something that has drifted back to me is the boilerplate definition of language: "a system of signs used by a society to communicate ideas." All sorts of animals have such systems inbred into them. Our Blue certainly does. He can project his attitude towards another dog by stance, the set of his head, the angle and activity of his tail. And, of course, by barks and growls.

In our species' early days, we probably had an inbred system much like Blue's, including the barks and growls (maybe not the tail-wagging). But when our brain evolved enough to support abstract thought, we began doing something unusual with the barks and growls.

The unusual thing we did was to make some of the sounds we could produce serve as names for things and actions. We created nouns and verbs. (Modifiers, conjunctions, etc., probably came a little later.) By tacking specific meanings to clusters of sounds, we created words, and finally, sentences. We got steadily better at shaping our barks and growls, and the end result was what I'm doing this very minute-and what we both do when we stop and talk on the street. Through a shared system of audible signs, we exchange what we're thinking.

It's miracle enough that we can meet in The Book Nook or in Schneider's or Danny's, bark at one another, and be understood. But another miracle occurs when you open up the Crier and hear me barking at you. Written language is a bigger step into abstraction. For you and I not only have a shared system of barks and growls, we've also mastered a back-up system: dots and squiggles, put on paper, that represent the barks and growls that represent the ideas.

It's astounding that we can do such a thing. We don't make much of it only because it's so commonplace. But think what human life would be without language. We'd be savages still, hardly able to share with others what any one of us had figured out to do. Little shared knowledge, little shared skills-and not just in a given generation. The whole mass of accumulating human abilities would never have begun its roll forward through the generations. It was language that allowed that. Language embodied the information, and language spread it.

Without language, we'd not only be trapped inside ourselves, unable to share thoughts with others. We'd have next to no thoughts to share-even with ourselves. For thinking is, by and large, talking to oneself, and that requires words. In fact, since the dawn of your rational capacity, you've been constantly talking to yourself. Some say it even continues when we sleep.

"Rot!" you just thought. "I don't talk to myself!" But you do, and you just demonstrated the fact. Your internal talk isn't arranged in formal sentences or paragraphs, but it's using words, just the same.

What we'd be without language is shown to us in Helen Keller's awesome story. As an infant, she lost both her hearing and sight, and was left in a world totally dark, totally silent. As she grew, the world around her was a chaos of smells, touches, tastes. But nothing she sensed had a name. For she had no language, no way to name anything.

Well, you know the story. Into Helen's young life came Annie Sullivan, a gritty teacher determined to give Helen a single first insight: things have names. And so her endlessly repeated exercise with the girl. She'd place Helen's hand on an object, then spell its name on her palm. And finally Helen grasped it. The moment is described in her autobiography.

"We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honey-suckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me."

Because we've inherited language, we can share in that moment, and in the history and all the accomplishments of humankind. By and large, we've done pretty well with our barks and growls.

Jim Atwell lives in and views life from Fly Creek. He can be found on the web at JimAtwell.com.