My father read to me as a boy and I was mannered enough not to stop him. It was unbearable-book after book that failed to make or change me, my father's lips twisting and stretching during a supposed story hour, massaging a stream of nonsense inside his mouth. I just find language plainly embarrassing. It is poor form, bad manners, that so much hope is pinned to such wrong sounds out of the mouth, to what is really only a sophisticated form of shouting and pain. It is not pleasant for me to hear "foreign" languages either. All languages are clearly alien and untrue, and, absent of so-called meaning, it is repeatedly clear that language is a social form of barely controlled weeping, a more sophisticated way to cry

- excerpt from Ben Marcus' novel Notable American Women.