When we do think about the state or origins of language, we often think about it as something based in the distant past.  But language is very much a living thing, with a direct nexus to our cultural evolution.   The choices we make about the words we use, reflect both our own place in the culture as well as the state of the culture itself.
This is all part of the unique work of Princeton Professor Daniel Cloud in The Domestication of Language: Cultural Evolution and the Uniqueness of the Human Animal.
My conversation with Professor Daniel Cloud:

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