Wilde once said that people are good until they learn how to talk. He was born into an age when philosophers were coming to the conclusion that language itself is a dubious, slippery commodity and that to talk is to learn how to tell lies. In consequence, many modern artists have distrusted fluency and eloquence, admiring hesitation and even inarticulacy as marks of the honesty of a speaker. Their ultimate guarantee of sincerity is not even a broken sentence but absolute, unqualified silence. Playwrights such as Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett have constructed their work around moments of shared silence or painful, pregnant pauses. For them language is a mere babble used to frame these epiphanies, or else a device to occlude the truth (as when one of Beckett's characters laments to a girlfriend that words are inadequate to conceal what he feels). Indeed, Beckett went so far as to characterise literature as 'the foul convention whereby you either lie or hold your peace'.

Commentators see this distrust of language as a fairly recent phenomenon, but, like so much else in modern theatre, that tradition has important origins in the work of Oscar Wilde. At the close of the first act of The Importance of Being Earnest Jack says 'Algy, you never talk anything but nonsense.' His companion has a deep reply: 'Nobody ever does.' That is to say, no matter how hard a person tries to prattle meaninglessly, there is always some tiny flicker of substance to it all.