A new study, Fish intake during pregnancy in relation to offspring’s early cognitive development, shows that
women who ate fish regularly during pregnancy had children with better language and communication skills by the age of 18 months.
Interesting, then, that fishermen seem to be such silent ghits:
| communicative fisherman | 0 | uncommunicative fisherman | 0 |
| talkative fisherman | 1 | silent fisherman | 37 |
| voluble fisherman | 0 | taciturn fisherman | 30 |
| noisy fisherman | 11 | quiet fisherman | 219 |
| half-open | 12 | half-closed | 286 |
Do children in fishing villages undergo special training to suppress their natal loquacity, enabling them to spend the rest of their lives in the dour silence which the rest of the world requires of their trade? I don’t know, but Conrad almost seems to suggest in End of the Tether that it is because non-verbal communication has been found superior:
Only a blurring cloud at first, the thin mist of her smoke would arise mysteriously from an empty point on the clear line of sea and sky. The taciturn fishermen within the reefs would extend their lean arms towards the offing; and the brown figures stooping on the tiny beaches, the brown figures of men, women, and children grubbing in the sand in search of turtles’ eggs, would rise up, crooked elbow aloft and hand over the eyes, to watch this monthly apparition glide straight on, swerve off – and go by. Their ears caught the panting of that ship; their eyes followed her till she passed between the two capes of the mainland going at full speed as though she hoped to make her way unchecked into the very bosom of the earth.
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