Opinion
Why Ask Why?
By Amiri Barksdale | May 20, 1997Since Julian Jaynes' origin of conscious ness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, the first questions entertained by men -- even before the cave-dwellers of Western Asia, North America, and the European peninsula painted graffiti on their walls--were questions of an unanswerable nature, all beginning with the parentally-dreaded, aspiratory phoneme "Why?" Several millennia later, verb forms introduced the existential "Why is?" You can be sure that there was a class of linguistic innovators, probably burned at the stake, for slotting noun phrases in at the end of this predicate. But it is only in the struggle for knowledge that history progresses.