RedT Reads Randomly

"After years of study, the (ant) Queen found human language to be a primitive and self defeating form of communication, light-years behind the instantaneous clarity and subtle nuance of her chemicals.

Human speech could mean everything and nothing at once. How could a species procreate, build, innovate, and survive with such an appallingly inadequate system, she wondered.  It was the study of language that made the Queen realize how easy it would be to turn the humans against themselves.  

Homo sapiens had a weakness for their language, a sort of gullibility. . . They had to rely on the faulty memory of storytellers, the biased interpretations of scribes, and the whims of inefficient bureaucrats in order to pass down their collected knowledge. . . They were merely talking monkeys, an unfortunate abnormality staining the elegance of the animal kingdom, and the entire world was worse off for it."

[page 40 of 358 -- I almost stopped reading on page 16 because of the scene with puppies, but after all, I think I'm going to like it.  For those of you who don't like talking animals, you'll probably want to give this a miss.]