Because unlike the lesser animals, for a human adulthood is not a biological, societal or a chronological question but an epistemological question. The answer is that you become an adult when you learn to think for and by your self. Most people are not adults by that standard.
How can anyone ever say anything original, personal, unique to him, when by definition language obliges us to draw from a well of pre-existing words?
When we are influenced by so many external forces—our times, the books we read, our sociocultural determinisms, our linguistic tics so deeply ingrained that they form our identity?
The speeches we are constantly bombarded with, in every possible and imaginable form…
Who has never caught a friend, a colleague, a parent, a father-in-law, repeating an argument they have read in a newspaper or heard on television, almost word for word?
As if he were speaking for himself. As if he had appropriated that speech. As if he were the source of those thoughts—
rather than a sponge, rehashing the same formulas, the same rhetoric, the same presuppositions, the same indignant inflections, the same knowing tone—
as if he were not simply the medium.
Binet, on Barthes and Foucault, and himself I suppose.
You need to learn the distinction between a word (the symbol) and the concept (the meaning) of language. By your standard a Frenchman could never communicate with an Englishman but we know that is not the case.
