Chapter 4 "Human words"

I remember the Dutch writer F. Van Eeden (2)—unfortunately he died last year—in a fairy tale, I remember that Little John listened to two fungi arguing and criticized from the sidelines, "You Both are poisonous," the fungi exclaimed, "Are you human? This is human words!" From the standpoint of the fungus, it should indeed be exclaimed.Human beings first pay attention to whether it is poisonous or non-toxic because they want to eat them, but for the bacteria themselves, this is completely irrelevant and not a problem at all. Although books or articles intended to give people scientific knowledge, they often speak too much "human language" in order to be interesting.This defect is unavoidable even in the famous "Souvenirs Entomologiques" by J.H. Fabre[3].Needless to say, I copied things at random.Recently, I came across an article [4] in a magazine that taught young people the knowledge of biology, which contained the following statement——

"Guano spiders... are shaped like bird droppings, but they can also lie still, pretending to be bird droppings." "In the animal world, there are many cannibals who cannibalize their own husbands, but the most famous ones are the spiders mentioned above and the praying mantises we will talk about now..." This is too much to say "human words".The guano spider is just like the guano in shape, and does not move around much. It is not that it deliberately pretends to be guano to deceive small insects.In the world of praying mantises, there is no theory of the Five Ethics[5]. It eats the male during mating, but it is just hungry and eating. How does it know that this thing is its lord.But once written in "human language", one becomes a murderer who conspired to kill her, and the other is a poisonous woman who murdered her husband.In fact, they are all wronged.

Among the "human dialects", there are various "human dialects": there are English dialects, and there are Chinese dialects.There are different kinds of Chinese dialects: there are "higher Chinese dialects" and "lower Chinese dialects".There is a joke in the west of Zhejiang that ridicules the ignorance of country women-"It is noon on a hot day, a peasant woman is doing hard work, and suddenly sighs: 'The empress really doesn't know how happy she is. At this time, she is not taking a nap on the bed. When he woke up, he shouted: "Eunuch, bring a persimmon!"'"

However, this is not the "inferior Chinese dialect", but the "inferior Chinese dialect" in the minds of the high-level Chinese, so it is actually a "high-level Chinese dialect".The inferior Chinese themselves might not have said that at the time, and even if they said it, they didn't think it was a joke. If we go on talking about it, it will cause troubles in class literature, "restrain it". Now quite a few people are writing books in the form of letters to youth or teenagers.Naturally, it must be "human words".But I don't know what kind of "human words" it is?Why not write to older people?Do you disdain to teach when you are old?Or are young people and teenagers more honest and easy to deceive?

March twenty-first. [1] This article was originally published on March 18, 1933 in "Shen Shen Free Talk", signed by He Jiaqian. [2] Wang Aiqin (1860-1932) Dutch writer and doctor.Published in 1885, it was translated into Chinese by Lu Xun in 1927, and published by Weiming Press in Peking in 1928.The debate on fungi is found in Chapter 5 of the book. [3] Fabre (1823-1915) French entomologist.He has a total of ten volumes, the first volume was published in 1879, and the tenth volume was published in 1910. It is a book introducing the living conditions of insects. [4] Refers to Wang Linong's article "Animal Instinct" published in the March 1933 issue of "Middle School Students".

〔5〕Five Ethics my country's feudal society called the five relationships of monarch and minister, father and son, husband and wife, brothers, and friends as "Five Ethics". "Mencius·Teng Wengong" stated that the criterion for these five relationships is "father and son have relatives, and monarch and minister have righteousness." , Husband and wife are different, seniors and young are orderly, and friends have faith."