“Anti-intellectual”? I? Are you familiar with the canine literary canon? When dogs talk in print or movies, their dese-and-dose doofiness makes your fur curl. Blame their translators. It’s not even doggerel (itself a medieval slight – a contraction of “dog Latin” – our calumniation hardly recent).

Illiterate does not mean stupid, stupid! The Egyptians knew that when they buried the royal guard dog, Abuwtiyuw (also transcribed Abutiu) in 2280 BCE with full funerary honors near the Great Pyramid of Ghiza. Was Homer stupid because he couldn’t write? In ancient Persia, dogs were protected animals, Herodotus reports. In Ashkelon, near Gaza, there’s this amazing way-back-when dog cemetery, keep your fingers crossed (poor Gaza!).

The point I’m endeavoring to make, if you’d quit being so defensive and listen, is not that humans are stupid from day one, but that language, which they rate their greatest innovation, stupefies at least as much as it instructs. By specifying, language distinguishes, and by distinguishing prompts a debate that never ends and before you know it leads to confusion and carnage (poor Gaza!).

Take a word, any word – blue, say. What does blue mean? For starters it means a lot of nots – not yellow, orange, white, black, etc. Does it mean cerulean, azure, aquamarine, sapphire, indigo, periwinkle, etc.? Well, yes, sometimes, but – Whose team do you pledge allegiance to, private? Cerulean, azure, aquamarine? Spit it out! Are you for us or against us? And so forth till guns blaze (or drones drill) to settle disputes about… nothing. (Poor Gaza!)

Deconstruct any quarrel. Nine times out of ten it’s about… definitions. “What do you mean this property’s yours?” “Do you love her or not?” Ad infinitum et tedium. Is there a meeting that doesn’t commence with a clarification of terms?

It gets worse. Carll tells me there are politicians in America who deliberately say the opposite of what they mean to bamboozle their own supporters. They figure the confusion they stir will plump their appeal. They pay other humans good money to cook up whoppers. When a fact inconveniences them, to hell with it, who needs truth when lies work quicker and cheaper?

We dogs find this odd. Why make life harder than it needs to be? When dogs differ, which we do – all living creatures intrude on the prerogatives of others – we settle things lickety-split with a growl or bite or dispatching if it comes to that. One and done, case closed, on we go. No trials, symposia, international confabs, troops – peace resumes and that’s that. We’re not pacifists, we’re realists. No language, no misunderstandings. One whiff of an anus and the truth outs, believe you me.

There’s no return to the sweet yesterday of preliteracy, no turning back the clock. (Yesterday and clocks are further evidence of the mischievous propensity of words.) Humans must writhe like Laocoon with the consequences of their purported brilliance. (Poor Gaza!)

The solution? (Humans, language-addled, must speak before they do.) I haven’t the foggiest. My job, self-assigned, is to say what I see, just like Carll’s, from his screwy vantage. “We tell the public which way the cat is jumping,” said Arthur H. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times back when newspapers were paper; “it’s up to the public to take care of the cat.” That articulated truth might ameliorate humans’ sorry condition remains their improbable faith. Besides, trying to say what’s going down is a hoot, makes the time fly, and garners new friends (“birds of a feather”), so why not? Frankly, I’m not hopeful humans can be saved, but we can romp a wee while, which isn’t half bad.