If lions could talk? Learning to live together in Britain

‘If lions could talk we would not understand them’ is an observation attributed to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who spent time in the 1940s working as a hospital porter in London and a lab assistant in Newcastle. Ludwig had been a very rich man in his youth. In middle age he experienced a little squalor. He said that just as we could not understand the thoughts of a lion simply by being suddenly made able to speak to a lion, so most rich people in 1940s Britain would not have understood the thoughts, fears and understanding of most poor people through conversation or vice versa. There was so much more to the social gaps in language than occasionally slipping in a bit of Latin.