Sesame Street on "What Does the Fox Say?"

What does the fox say? Cookie Monster asked the resident fox on Sesame Street. He's a good sport about it, but Ylvis drew all the wrong conclusions.

In his Confessions, Augustine explained how language develops socially in a human child:

When they called something by name and pointed it out while they spoke, I saw it and realized that the thing they wished to indicate was called by the name they then uttered. And what they meant was made plain by the gestures of their bodies, by a kind of natural language, common to all nations, which expresses itself through changes of countenance, glances of the eye, gestures and intonations which indicate a disposition and attitude--either to seek or to possess, to reject or to avoid. So it was that by frequently hearing words, in different phrases, I gradually identified the objects which the words stood for and, having formed my mouth to repeat these signs, I was thereby able to express my will. Thus I exchanged with those about me the verbal signs by which we express our wishes and advanced deeper into the stormy fellowship of human life, depending all the while upon the authority of my parents and the behest of my elders.

What does the fox say? The solitary fox, who slips into the video, then disappears, does not say. That’s the point. The atomized fox lacks the essential connections to a society that will give it the ability to advance “deeper into the stormy fellowship” of vulpine life.


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