From An Exaltation of Larks, or The Venereal Game (1968) by James Lipton.

“Our language, one of our most precious natural resources in the English-speaking countries, is also a dwindling one that deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands, streams and whooping cranes. We don’t write letters, we make long-distance calls; we don’t read, we are talked to, in the resolutely twelve-year-old vocabulary of radio and television. Under the banner of Timesaving we are offered only the abbreviated, the abridged, the aborted. Our Noble Eightfold Path consists entirely of shortcuts. And what are we urged to do with the time saved by these means? Skim through the Reader’s Digest at eighteen hundred words a minute, eating a pre-cooked dinner of condensed soup and reconstituted meat and vegetables on a jet going six hundred miles an hour. Refreshed by our leisurely holiday we can then plunge back into the caucus-race with renewed vigor, dashing breathless behind the Dodo toward an ever-retreating finish-line. Before it is too late I would like to propose a language sanctuary, a wild-word refuge, removed and safe from the hostile environment of our TV-tabloid world.

“Perhaps it is already too late. Under the influence of film and television especially (both valuable but intensely pictorial arts) the picture is finally replacing those maligned thousand words. Soon, if all goes badly, we may be reduced to a basic vocabulary of a few hundred smooth, homogenized syllables, and carry tiny movie projectors and bandoliers of miniaturized film cartridges to project our more important thoughts (too precious to entrust to mere words) in the proper pictorial form on the shirtfront of our conversational partner. Eventually we may be able to press a button on our belt and produce an instantaneous, abstract, psychedelic, atonal, aleatory light-show that will penetrate straight to the beholder’s chromosomes, influencing not only him or her, but logophobic generations yet unborn. Wordless, we will build the new Jerusalem!”