Language: The Loaded Weapon: The Use and Abuse of Language Today

225 Pages·2014·3.82 MB·English

by  Dwight Bolinger

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Language- The Loaded Weapon
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Language - The Loaded
Weapon
The use and abuse of language today
Dwight Bolinger
~ ~~o~~~~n~s~~up
LONDON AND NEW YORK
To the memory of beloved Ruth
First published 1980 by Pearson Education Limited
Thirteenth impression 1999
Published 2014 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 1980, Taylor & Francis.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Notices
Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new
research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research
methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become
necessary.
Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience
and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, com
pounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or
methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of
others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.
To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, con
tributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to
persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or other
wise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions,
or ideas contained in the material herein.
ISBN 13: 978-0-582-29108-9 (pbk)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bolinger, Dwight
Language, the loaded weapon
I. Sociolinguistics
I. Title
301.2'1 P40 80-40301
Contents
Acknowledgments VI
Preface VII
I. Lo the shaman I
2. The nonverbal womb 10
3. Signs and symbols 17
4. Above the word 25
5. Appointment in Babylon 38
6. Stigma, status, and standard 44
7. We reduced the size because we didn't
want to increase the price 58
8. Guns don't kill people, people kill
people 68
9. A case in point: sexism 89
10. Power and deception 105
II. Another case in point: the jargonauts
and the not-so-golden fleece 125
12. Rival metaphors and the confection of
reality 138
13. A last case in point: bluenoses and
coffin nails 156
14. School for shamans 166
15. An ecology of language 182
Notes to chapters 189
Further reading 202
Index 205
Acknowledgments
My first thanks are to the person who encouraged this project when it
was less than a glimmer, and who nursed it along as it grew: Peggy
Drinkwater, Longman's editor for linguistics until her retirement (with
the manuscript still in her hands) in 1979.
I thank the several readers who steered me away from certain
quicksands: Geoffrey Leech, who read the manuscript for Longman,
and William Howarth, Terence Langendoen, and James Sledd, who
read it for Princeton University Press.
I thank my artist friend Shirley Ortiz for her suggestions and
encouragement.
I thank all those who took the trouble to provide me with material,
especially Walter M. Brasch for quotations from William Smith and
Bayard Rustin; Carol N. Brown of the Saturday Evening Post for copies
of the Curtis Code; the Miami Herald for material on George Smathers;
Randy Riddle of KCBS San Francisco for comments on his interview
with William E. Colby; and Alan Simpson for the text of his 'Liberal
Education in a University'.
I thank those several scholars, too many to name, whose unpublished
works were referred to and who kept me up to date on the progress of
publication.
We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright
material:
Harper and Row Publishers Inc for extracts from Simple and Direct:
A Rhetoric For Writers by Jacques Barzun Copyright@ 1975 by Jacques
Barzun. Reprinted by permission of Harper and Row Publishers Inc; the
author, Sydney W. Riser for an extract from her letter published in Palo
Alto Times 17 November 1978 (now known as Peninsula Times Tribune);
the author, John Simon for extracts from the Dick Cavett Show on
Public Television USA 11-12 January 1978.
Preface
In this century there has been one - perhaps only one - upsurge of
popular interest in how language affects our lives. It began with the
publication of Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity ( 1933)-or, rather,
with the popularizations of his work that appeared a few years later.
Korzybski was a Polish-born scientist and philosopher whose interest in
the continuity of culture led him to a study of the means of culture
transmission in modern society, which of course is language first of all.
His laboratory was the failures of transmission, which he investigated in
psychiatric patients. He was a pathologist of language; he probed the
sane and insane ways of speaking and understanding, and the social ills
that result from certain forms of linguistic insanity, by no means
confined to psychiatric wards. He not only observed but prescribed: his
system of 'General Semantics' embodied a training in linguistic hygiene.
Korzybski's best-known disciples were Stuart Chase and Samuel
Hayakawa. Chase was an economist who spent two years wrestling with
the formidable prose of Science and Sanity before bringing out his
Tyranny of Words in 1938, a down-to-earth version of General
Semantics that for a time enjoyed enormous popularity. Hayakawa's
Language in Action (now Language in Thought and Action) was a Book
of-the-Month Club selection when it first appeared in 1941. Much ofthe
excitement generated by these two books and other popularizations was
due to the flood of propaganda from both sides in the Second World
War, whose rumblings coincided with the appearance of Korzybski's
work. The public was being lied to a11d knew it, and there was keen
interest in ways of detecting the deceptions. In America a number of
well-known figures, including Clyde Beals, W. H. Kilpatrick, Paul
Douglas (later Senator from Illinois), and Robert Lynd, established an
Institute of Propaganda Analysis. But the excitement soon died. By the
end of 1941 the country was too busy generating propaganda to spend
much time analyzing it. One of the echoes from that time is the still
current use of the word semantics to mean verbal pettifogging - now
joined by rhetoric in a similar sense (extended from an older unfavorable
meaning, 'ostentatious language'). In the schools the ideas have been
kept alive by Hayakawa's book, which has remained a favorite. Among
linguistic scholars General Semantics was never highly regarded, partly
VIII Preface
because of its therapeutic claims and the fact that Korzybski became a
sort of cult figure, and partly because of a shortness of vision in
linguistics itself at the time.
But there was also a weakness that General Semantics shares with
nearly all the writings about language as a manipulator of minds and
emotions: they seldom dig below the meanings of individual words.
Korzybski wanted to make everyone aware of the conflict between
nature in flux and the deceptive stability of words. Labels persist: one
can permanently criminalize a man or a woman by viewing the person as
a unitary individual. Is George in 1981 the same George as the George of
1970, who stole a car for a joyride? The way to escape this kind of false
equation is to index him: George and George Maybe he is the
1970 1981•
same, maybe not. There is no denying the importance of this kind of
critique, but it sees only the bumps on the landscape. The underground
streams, the buried strata, the fossils, the faults, and the veins of ore-the
grammar as a whole and even the broader semantics of the words-all
too often go unexamined. No slight was intended, but as the
professional linguists of Korzybski's day in America were not much
interested in meaning, much less therapeutics, the General Semanticists
had no scientific body of information about language to draw upon.
Circumstances have changed, and we are in a better position now to take
up where they left off.
Though it got very little attention at the time, and none from the
public, the work of two American linguists, Edward Sapir and
Benjamin Lee Whorf, adopting a philosophy like that of the German
linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt a century earlier, did venture into the
relationships between language and thinking, on the premise that every
language has a structure that must somehow influence the way its
speakers view the world. Is a language that has few or no adjectives
correspondingly weak in notions of detachable qualities? Is a language
rich in verbs correspondingly strong in its concepts of processes as
against things-which would agree better with modern physics than the
noun-heavy languages of Western Europe? Whorf compared English
with the language of the Hopi Indians, and believed that such
differences~ceptualization exist.
Very likely they do, though linguists have hardly pursued this
question beyond where Whorf left it, and some have been skeptical of
the whole idea, arguing that translators have always been able to find
ways of expressing even the most complex ideas in whatever language.
The focus at present is on painting with a wider brush on a broader
canvas. Linguists are more inclined to play down the differences
between languages and look for the traits they have in common. They
feel that the shared inheritance of humanity is more apt to make us think
alike and use similar means of expression for all the important things.
The differences, radical as they may seem, represent only the materials
that particular societies have found available, handed down to them by
their culture, to convey the gamut of shared human wants, interests,
Preface 1x
fears, pleasures, and concerns, with differences of no more real
importance than that between the use of wood to build shelters by
forest-dwellers and the use of adobe by the inhabitants of the desert. It
will hardly do to assume that speakers of Chinese are telegraphic in their
thinking just because a literal translation from the Chinese sounds a bit
like a telegram. What happens to the rogues and victims of English
happens or can happen to their counterparts in every other language in
the world.
This is the assumption that underlies the pages ahead, and if it is
correct, then the influences of language on thinking and behavior must
be everywhere pretty much the same. The manifestations will reflect
social differences more than fundamental linguistic ones. If a society
lacks a complex bureaucracy, then the sort of language that bureaucrats
adopt for self-identification and self-protection will not develop; but the
seeds of it will be there and might perhaps be found in the incantations of
a priesthood. Verbal domains that pertain to science will be absent in
non-technical societies; but if there is an invasion of technology the
terms and expressions will accompany it and swiftly adapt themselves to
the existing linguistic structure. The marvelous thing is that every
language has the CAPACITY to take the form that its users require. But it
also, through its existing form, helps to shape the requirements - and
that is the theme of this book.
Dwight Bolinger
Palo Alto
1980