Vol. 72 No. 1 — January/February 1991 —
Words, Thoughts
and Deeds
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Language has been called the most powerful
drug known to humanity. The words we hear and speak can have
a distorting effect on our points of view. If we do not want
others to take over our minds, we should watch words closely.
And never mistake their rhetoric for our own ideas ...
Some years ago two schools of psychological theory engaged
in one of those academic disputes that are as intriguing as
they are irresolvable. The issue was whether human thought
is formed in words , or whether people "feel" their way to
ideas, unconsciously choosing words to describe their thoughts
as they go along. One side contended that it is impossible
to do any reasoning without using language. The other argued
that animals are capable of rudimentary reasoning even though
they are incapable of speech.
The debate was still underway when somebody pointed out
that, for all practical purposes, it was irrelevant. Human
beings might or might not think in words, but without words,
their thoughts might as well never have been conceived. As
the authors of the composition textbook Writing and Thinking
put it, "thinking is no better or useful than the thinker's
ability to use words to communicate. A scientist who knew
the cure for cancer but couldn't explain it to doctors would
be of little comfort to cancer patients , and of no use to
the medical profession. A college student who says he knows
the answer to a question but can't express it gets just as
low a grade as the student who frankly says he doesn't know
it."
Though language may not be the basis of thinking of every
kind, it is clearly essential to the kind most of us do normally.
This consists of asking questions to ourselves and trying
to arrive at answers that are reasonably clear in our own
minds.
If we go on to share with other people the conclusions we
have reached, we must then arrange words in logical order
in the hope that the others can understand us. Often the act
of putting ideas into sentences for outside consumption has
the effect of refining our thoughts, or of suggesting new
avenues of thought to follow. In this way language serves
not only as a carrier but as a generator of ideas.
To the extent that we think in language, our thoughts are
restricted by the number of words at our command and by our
sensitivity to their meaning. It follows that to exercise
our mental powers fully and to enhance our understanding of
life, we should expand and sharpen our vocabularies.
Yet no matter how extensive our knowledge of words, we should
be aware that we can never exercise complete control over
them. Words are active, changing, slippery things that do
not lend themselves to machine-like precision. That is why
philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead, whose first discipline
was mathematics, have insisted that objective truths cannot
be expressed in verbal terms.
Even the unexpressed words we keep in our heads have emotional
connotations that can distort our viewpoint. For example,
newspapers used to ask celebrities to make lists of the 10
most beautiful words in the language. In these "mother," "home,"
" children," and "love" consistently ranked high, not because
they sounded particularly beautiful in themselves, but because
of the things for which they stood.
When such words occur in their thoughts, people susceptible
to their emotional appeal are less likely to think matters
through in a systematic and objective way than to form opinions
out of sentiment. The case of a mother who committed
a crime for the < I> love of her children and in
defence of her home might be decided in the jurors'
minds before they ever go to court.
If words are not trustworthy in the privacy of our heads,
they are even less so when they are converted to speech or
writing. The French philosopher Montaigne observed that every
word is composed of two parts, belonging equally to the speaker
and the listener. The dual nature of language makes it necessary
for participants in any serious discussion to watch carefully
the words both they and the other party choose.
"If you wish to converse with me, define your terms," said
Voltaire . In The Story of Philosophy , Will Durant
commented: "How many a debate would have been deflated into
a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms!
This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of
it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be
subject to strictest scrutiny and definition."
The definition of words has an effect not only on what we
think, but on how we think. In Explorations
in Awareness , J. Samuel Bois described how, in translating
French to English, he found that there was no English equivalent
of fleuve , for a great river running into the sea.
English-speakers had to make do with the same word to describe
the mighty St. Lawrence and a stream one could throw a stone
across. In a later translation job, however , Bois learned
that French could accommodate no distinction among the English
words "giggle," "titter," and "chuckle." In French, they all
were ricaner .
"The moral of the story," he wrote, "is that I don't see
the same things, I don't observe the same events when I change
my English for my French thinking tool. Changing my language
changes me as an observer. It changes my world at the same
time."
Much is suggested by those words that are included in a
national vocabulary and those that are left out. For instance,
according to the expatriate Soviet writer and scholar Azary
Messerer, "there is no such word as privacy in the modern
Russian language. The latest and most comprehensive English-Russian
dictionary, edited by Professor I. Galperin, translates 'privacy'
as 'loneliness, intimacy , or secrecy' but says nothing about
the right to live free from interference in one's private
life."
In noting this omission, Messerer was making an ideological
point, contrasting the collectivism of the old-line Communists
with the individualism of the western democracies. His bias
towards the latter brings up one of the basic rules of general
semantics: that, as S.I. Haywakawa wrote, "It is important
to sort out from any utterance the information given
from the speaker's feeling toward that information
." Doing so helps us to prevent others from manipulating our
thoughts.
Even when we are thinking on our own, however, we would
do well to remember that political terms are exceptionally
tricky. Take the word "democracy," of which the American writer
Bernard Smith observed: "The words men fight and die for are
the coins of politics , where by much usage they are soiled
and by much manipulating debased. That evidently has been
the fate of the word 'democracy.' It has come to mean what
anyone wants it to mean."
True enough. Democracy has cropped up in the names of some
of the world's most dictatorial jurisdictions, such as the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the Democratic Republic
of Afghanistan. Generations of absolute tyrants have claimed
to be defending democracy as they lined up their opponents
in front of firing squads.
"Political" words can also mean drastically different things
to people according to where they stand. To the Northern abolitionists
in the American Civil War, the words "liberty" and "freedom"
meant liberty and freedom for the slaves in the breakaway
states of the Confederacy. To the Confederates, they meant
the liberty and freedom to secede from the federal union and
to maintain slavery.
When it comes to language, the world of politics is like
the world of Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's Through
the Looking Glass . In it he tells Carroll's heroine
Alice that when he uses a word, it means just what he chooses
it to mean.
"The question is," says Alice, "whether you can
make words mean so many different things."
Humpty Dumpty's reply is pure realpolitik : "The
question is which is to be master - that's all."
In his novel 1984 , George Orwell presented a
picture of a bizarre society in which the "Ministry of Truth"
dispenses words that mean just what the dictator, Big Brother,
wants them to mean. The state language, Newspeak, turns logic
inside-out in brazen contempt for the public intelligence.
Hence the universal slogan, " War is Peace."
Orwell wrote his cautionary tale in 1948, reversing the
last two digits of the year to indicate some time late in
the century. Writing in et cetera , the journal
of general semantics, in the actual year 1984, communications
professor Terence P. Moran drew attention to how much the
use of language in American politics had come to resemble
Orwell's speculations: "In which 1984 do we call the MX nuclear
missile 'the Peacekeeper?'" he asked. Professor Moran noted
that, when then-President Ronald Reagan ordered the withdrawal
of U. S. Marines from Lebanon after they had suffered heavy
casualties, he called it a "redeployment." "This bit of newspeak
inspired such historical revisions as 'Napoleon's Redeployment
from Moscow' and 'Custer's Last Redeployment,'" Moran wrote.
There is a long tradition of using euphemisms to cover up
the real horrors of war. An official dispatch from a battlefront
might read: "Elements of the Fourth Division repulsed attacks
from the enemy Sixth Army supported by aerial and artillery
bombardment. Casualties on both sides were heavy." This says
nothing of the hundreds of men who had their stomachs blasted
open or their arms, legs or heads blown off. In a similar
vein, an American general in Europe once referred to civilian
casualties as "collateral damage." An "interdictional nonsuccumber"
was how the U.S. Defense Department described a person in
Viet Nam who had survived bombing attacks.
Short of war, euphemisms have always been used in politics
to candy- coat unpalatable realities. While the words in the
mouths of the parties in power are "smoother than butter,"
as Shakespeare wrote, the language of opposition parties is
unadulterated vinegar. The discerning voter will make allowances
for the motives behind the words when the government says
that a proposed policy will lead to broad new uplands of progress
and the opposition says of the same policy that it will bring
the ruination of the nation and "the democratic way of life."
Politics, however, is not confined to parliamentary chambers.
We think in political terms constantly without being aware
of doing so . The power of language starts to influence our
political opinions in early childhood. We are all imbued with
the prejudices of the particular social group into which we
were born, and we receive this indoctrination from the language
we hear.
If early in life we "learn" to associate a certain word
like the name of an ethnic group with something objectionable
to our group, the negative associations are likely to stick
in our minds when we reach adulthood. No matter what objective
evidence we encounter to the contrary, members of such-and-such
a nationality or religion will always be dirty or lazy, drunken
or greedy, stingy or crooked, depending on which stereotype
we apply to which particular group.
These and other opinions such as those on the role of the
sexes are fundamentally political because the images created
by language will loom up in our minds when one or the other
of these groups makes a bid for a recognition of rights or
draws attention to some point of discrimination against them.
For the most part, our prejudices are unconscious; they are
conditioned by words we use so frequently that they have become
second nature. Consciously or not, we are unlikely to be very
sympathetic or fair to people we have been talking about in
pejorative language all our lives.
One of the things children learn to do in their pre-school
years is to "call names" at those who are different from them
and their playmates. If they are on the receiving end of the
name-calling, they learn to taunt back: "Sticks and stones
will break my bones, but names will never hurt me!" No saying
could be further from the truth.
First of all, words can hurt us emotionally,
with an effect deeper and more lasting than a physical injury.
Secondly, the declaration that words can do no physical harm
is fallacious. It is words that cause mobs to pick up sticks
and stones to break the bones of the people they have learned
to look upon with repugnance or hatred. Words have been responsible
for some of the most horrible crimes of humanity. Naziism
got its start by calling names.
The Nazis were masters of propaganda, which consists largely
of rhetoric. Among the definitions of rhetoric is "language
designed to persuade or impress (often with implication of
its insincerity, exaggeration, etc.)"
In prison after the abortive Munich putsch , Adolf
Hitler developed the principles of how to rule men's minds
with artful language. He set about becoming a master orator
in the full knowledge that, as the English writer Joseph Chatfield
said, " Oratory is the power to talk people out of their sober
and natural opinions."
Hitler knew how to pick the "right" words for his purposes
and to arrange them in slogans which, repeated over and over,
could utterly overwhelm non-conformity with party doctrine.
He further knew how slogans could obviate public scrutiny
of policy and anaesthetize the conscience, wiping out every
human consideration in the interests of "the master race."
Of course, propaganda (the Latin-based word stems from the
propagation of the Roman Catholic faith) was practised
long before Hitler came on the scene in the 1920s. What was
different from his time on was that propagandists could use
mass media such as radio, film and wire services to reach
around the world. Everyone everywhere became a potential candidate
for what was later known as brain-washing. Then came television,
and with it the witch- hunting U. S. Senator Joseph McCarthy,
who managed to turn the word "Communist" into a terrifying
scourge.
Because it slings words at its listeners with such disconcerting
speed, and because the visual images it presents further blur
the perceptions, television has heightened the need to be
careful not to take words at face value. Not that anybody
does so entirely; everyone knows that television commercials,
like all other advertising, make fulsome use of exaggeration.
But while we allow for a degree of hyperbole in advertising,
we are perhaps less rigorous in discounting the more subtle
but no less contrived exaggerations we hear in news and public
affairs programs.
Exaggeration is a natural part of language. We all blow
words out of proportion to their original meaning, and sometimes
depart from their meaning entirely. A good meal isn't literally
marvellous, which the dictionary defines as "astonishing"
or "extremely improbable." Nor is a bad meal literally terrible
- "awful, dreadful , formidable, very great or bad."
Words are often used in a less than literal way to plant
desirable ideas. The British Royal Navy, for instance, has
traditionally given its ships names like Invincible
and Indomitable , though the Lords of the Admiralty
are well aware that no war ship could actually be invincible
or indomitable. Presumably they hoped that the sailors aboard
them would conduct themselves as if the names proclaimed a
simple fact.
These are cases of words meaning not only what people want
them to mean, but what people hope they will mean.
Thus a young man will call a girl his sweetheart in the hope,
and with the suggestion , that she will come to fit that description.
In black magic, spells are cast and curses made with words
the speaker fiercely hopes will become reality.
"The old idea that words possess magical powers is false,"
Aldous Huxley wrote, "but its falsity is the distortion of
a very important truth. Words do have a magical
effect - but not in the ways that the magicians supposed,
and not on the objects that they are trying to influence.
Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those
who use them."
It is to tap into this magic that sloganeers try to plant
words in the public mind which produce reflexive generalizations.
"A good catch word," the American politician Wendell Wilkie
once said, "can obscure analysis for fifty years."
Cleverly-chosen language has the effect of simplifying ideas,
to the relief of those who are intellectually lazy. Life is
rarely as simple as the language we use to describe it. Still,
we all generalize, and by doing so we fall into the trap of
believing that all things in a certain category are the same:
all pigs are dirty, all professors are wise, all women are
bad drivers. By attaching generalized labels to the pictures
that crop up in our minds, we do an injustice not only to
others, but to our better selves.
According to the prophet of general semantics, Alfred Korzybski,
the Indo-European language structure, with its strong emphasis
on " is" and "is not," tends to make for generalizations and
snap judgments. We talk of right and wrong, good and bad,
etc., taking little or no notice of the gradations between
these extreme states. Such verbal polarization militates against
reasonable solutions to problems. Anyone who suggests a middle
way between opposites is likely to come under fire from both
sides.
The first rule of semantics is that words are nothing but
the symbols of things and ideas. To paraphrase Korzybski,
language is to reality what the map is to the territory -
"the map," he kept repeating, "is not the territory."
It is when words are confused with the things they represent
that we run into dangerous delusions. John Kenneth Galbraith
called what results from the substitution of a word for a
fact a "wordfact."
"It means," he wrote, "that to say something exists is a
substitute for its existence. And to say that something will
happen is as good as having it happen .... By bold use of
the wordfact, we were able to convert South American dictators
into bulwarks of the free world ."
In this clamorous day and age, independent-minded individuals
should be on the constant look-out for wordfacts and other
calculated misuses of language. It is not too much for citizens
to insist, at least in their own sovereign minds, that the
words employed in political discourse mean what they are commonly
understood to mean.
If one group calls another "terrorists" or says that they
are using "violence" or accuses them of "committing genocide,"
we should decide for ourselves, on the balance of evidence,
whether terrorism or violence or genocide is actually being
perpetrated. We should guard against attempts to hijack our
thinking by slogans, catch- words, or rhetoric designed to
inflame our opinions or turn us against enemies manufactured
by "wordfact" techniques.
And we should be ever-conscious of the insidious danger
of using packaged words as substitutes for original ideas.
We should not allow others, any more than we should allow
ourselves, to confuse words with the reality they symbolize.
Eternal vigilance as to the use of words is the price of freedom
of thought and expression. In a democracy, the war against
the misuse of words cannot be a purely public one. Each individual
must stand on guard over his or her own mind.
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