Bolinger Dwight - Language - the Loaded Weapon

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I thank those several scholars, too many to name, whose unpublished works were referred to and who kept me up to date on the progress of publication.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.

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 of the 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 and 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 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 1970 and George 1981. Maybe he is the 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.