LANGUAGE REVISION BY DELETION OF ABSOLUTISMS'

Transcription

1 ALLEN WALKER READ* LANGUAGE REVISION BY DELETION OF ABSOLUTISMS' ANY PROPOSALS, IN A wide variety, have been made for revi ing the M Engli h language in order to increa e it efficiency and u efulne. Some would deal with the morphological level ("I am, you am, he am, we am, you e am, they am"), while other would make tructural change on the yntactical level, uch a altering the ubject-predicate relation hip. The imple t and mo t fea ible method i revi ion by vocabulary election. The que tion might be a ked whether thi i "language revi ion" at all. In one en e we are revi ing the language whenever we con truct a new entence. Yet in doing o we are electing element from the re ource offered to u out of the form available. Po ibly thi hould be called "idiolectal revi ion"-that i, the revi ion of each per on' individual u age, not the language it elf. It i ea ily open to u to make deliberate choice on the lexical level. I am propo ing in thi paper that we make certain vocabulary choice that will bring our di cour e into accord with the world a we actually find it. It i clear to many of u that we live in a proce world, in which our judgment can only be probabili tic. Therefore we would do well to avoid finali tic, ab oluti tic term. Can we ever find "perfection" or "certainty" or "truth"? No! Then let u top u ing uch word in our formulation. In pre enting my point of view, I hope that I will avoid the danger of mere "word magic." I am advocating the orientation of relativi m and contextuality, and the particular word are important merely becau e they indicate an orientation. Thi i not a plea for "moderation" or the "golden *Allen Walker Read, Profe or Emeritu of Engli h at Columbia Univer ity, ha written widely in the field of modern Engli h. t Thi paper wa given at the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, at Indiana Univer ity, Bloomington, Indiana, October 13,

2 8 Et cetera SPRING 1985 mean; worthy a tho e goal are, but I wi h to make a deeper philo ophical point. We need a new way of looking at the world-a revi ed orientation that i ometime called "Heraclitean": the recognition of change from minute to minute. The vocabulary of ab oluti m i very much with u even on the colloquial level. How ea y it i to ay : "No, thank you, I'm perfectly comfortable.' Perfectly? Or we can exclaim, "I'm ab olutely dead!" Such expre - ion do not cau e any real trouble, but they are ymptomatic of a common orientation. One open a Chine e fortune cookie to find, "Perfection i your everla ting goal.' Adverti ing practice accu tom u to ab oluti tic pattern. Thu in a current new paper a baking company in Great Neck, on Long I land, claim that it i ituated in "the community with the ab olutely mo t di criminating weet tooth in America (po ibly the world)." (1) Thi u e the rhetorical device of hyperbole, a different matter from what I am di cu ing. Foremo t among the word to be eliminated i the word certain. It i very ea y to begin a entence with, "I'm certain that" ; but it i ju t a ea y to ay, "It eem to me that-." The "que t for certainty" ha engaged the attention of many thinker, and it will take a genuine revolution to ub titute the probabili tic outlook, to learn to live without certaintie. Sound emiotician will agree, I think, with the dictum of Alfred North Whitehead, in hi book Proce and Reality : "In philo ophical di cu ion, the mere t hint of dogmatic certainty a to finality of tatement i an exhibition of folly." (2) I read that in the copy u ed by Alfred Korzyb ki, now in the library of the In titute of General Semantic, and he underlined the pa age with a magenta pencil, to make it tand out beyond the other underlining. And yet he had a critici m, for he wrote in the margin : "not with a date." He recognized that the limiting of an ab oluti m change it character. Whitehead paid careful attention to terminology. He di carded the term "Platonic form ;" "e ence;' and other, and then continued : "Accordingly, by way of employing a term devoid of mi leading ugge tion, I u e the phra e `eternal object!"' (3) Thu he eemed unaware of the danger of the ab oluti m "eternal.' Alfred Korzyb ki, in the copy I have cited, wrote in the margin, "very mi leading :' Alfred Korzyb ki him elf ha a very good pa age in which he harply attacked the phra e "eternal veritie." A he wrote in Science and Sanity in 1933 : From time immemorial, ome men were uppo ed to deal in one-valued `eternal veritie! We called uch men `philo opher ' or `metaphy ician : But they eldom realized that all their `eternal veritie ' con i ted of word, and word which, for the mo t part, belonged to a primitive language, reflecting in it tructure the a umed tructure of the world of remote antiquity. Be ide, they did not realize that the e `eternal veritie ' la t only o long a the human

3 LANGUAGE REVISION BY DELETION OF ABSOLUTISMS 9 nervou y tem i not altered. Under the influence of the e `philo opher ; two-valued `logic, and confu ion of order of ab traction, nearly all of u contracted a firmly rooted predilection for `general' tatement `univer al, a they are called-which, in mo t ca e, inherently involved the emantic onevalued conviction of validity for all `time' to come. (4) Whitehead and Korzyb ki are only two of a long li t of philo opher that could be cited for their oppo ition to ab oluti m. But what i de irable i to make thi outlook available to a wide general public, and I wi h to propo e a device for doing o. If a jaunty name for a popular movement could be devi ed, it might catch on and have a wide pread influence. What I am propo ing i the name "EMA;" made from the initial of "Engli h Minu Ab oluti m." A wide popular vogue for EMA might anitize and improve our u e of Engli h a a communicative vehicle. "Let' u e EMA" could well become an important directive for increa ing anity in our time. The u e of EMA will have many ramification. Some que tionable u age can be potted ea ily, but other are omewhat hidden. For in tance, i the word beginning an ab oluti m? The danger of that word ha been pointed out in a recent polemical di cu ion of co mology, in the following pa age : We often read cienti t who refer to "the beginning of the univer e." They are being carele with their language, for to the be t of our knowledge the univer e had no beginning. It apparently underwent a tremendou tran formation ome twenty billion year ago, but the tran formation wa not a beginning in any ab olute en e. Scienti t houldn't be giving fodder to tho e theologian who are determined to find God omewhere. (5) I there validity in glittering tatement like "Never ay never ;" or "Thi i a univer e where nothing never happen "? The oppo ite of a quality create an ab oluti m -intolerable, ineradicable, in oluble, incorrigible, interminable, impregnable, infallible. In popular parlance, irre i tible force are often meeting immovable object. How can we alvage the u eful notion of "invariance"? Can we develop the en itivity to di criminate between everla ting (which i ab oluti tic) and enduring (not ab oluti tic)? I endle an ab oluti m? In a tronomy the term "fixed tar" ha had ome u age, by way of contra t with the planet. But it ha been found that they are not "fixed :' Ptolemy in the econd century made a record of the tar a he aw them, but Edmund Halley, in the eighteenth century, found that their relative po ition had changed, the clo er one mo t of all, and now the tar are known to have what i called "proper motion' The word fixed i even le permi ible when it i applied to language. A profe or of political cience at Tulane Univer ity ha lauded the United State Con titution a having "permanent principle and fixed language'' (6)

4 10 Et cetera SPRING 1985 The notion of "fixed" language, out ide the reach of interpretation, i a fal e one; and clearer thinker have gone o far a to ay that the Con titution i whatever the judge ay it i. One of the mo t problematical of the ab oluti tic word i the word all. In my own field of lingui tic, I am often urpri ed at the abandon with which ome lingui t u e the term "all language " and then draw que tionable conclu ion about o-called "univer al." They would do well to ay "all language o far tudied." Thi introduce the "limited all' or the "indexed all If one ay "All chair have four leg ;' the all there i imply a function of the definition, meaning that an example in the cla `chair' i to be delineated by it having four leg. If an innovator come along and provide a fifth leg, then it i not a "chair ;" but a " uper-chair" or whatever one might choo e to call it. If one wi he to con ider a three-legged tool, one would have a cla ification problem that would be decided arbitrarily. The "ail " that cau e trouble are the "unlimited all." So prevalent are they in popular u age that ome teacher of general emantic inveigh trongly again t what they call "allne :' Semantically allied to all i the word complete. A re-orientation would take place if we could build into our di cour e the habitual u e of "et cetera" or at lea t the awarene of the need of an "et cetera." The grue omene of "totalitariani m" hould warn u of the danger of the word total. In fact, reference to the "total woman" in recent year became a laughing tock. Notion of "perfection" and what i "perfect" plague u, and the pur uit of EMA hould do away with them. The epithet "perfectioni t" ha ju tifiably become a term of derogation. The late Luigi Barzini, in hi book The European, found fault with American for their "relentle pur uit of ultimate and unreachable perfection" and for their belief in "the endle perfectability of man" (7) American do believe in improvement and amelioration, and thi can ea ily be tran formed into a belief in "perfectibility" The o-called "idea of progre " i not in it elf ab oluti tic, but many people jump to the conclu ion that the goal of progre mu t be "perfection" and thu are turned off from it, wherea progre in it natural context refer to continual melioration. In my own experience a a teacher in department of Engli h, I have continually had to battle the word correct, particularly in my cour e "Problem in Engli h U age" that I taught for over twenty year at Columbia Univer ity. The tudent come to me, after their year in grade chool and high chool, with the u ual que tion on their lip, "I it correct to ay oand- o?" Thi pre- uppo e that there i ome "well-formed" language "out there;" apart from what appear on people' tongue, and it i very difficult to get acro the notion that language i an in trument of ocial interaction that developed naturali tically. I have to battle the word correct con-

5 LANGUAGE REVISION BY DELETION OF ABSOLUTISMS 11 tinually with ub titute like "I it appropriate to ay o-and- o?" E pecially important would be a hift in our attitude toward Engli h pelling. There i no commoner phra e than "the correct pelling" It form a matrix in which fal e attitude toward language are engendered. If pelling i either correct or incorrect, then that ame tandard can be applied to other thing too. Here the chief factor i that mi leading word correct. In all uch ca e, we hould ub titute an appropriate term uch a "the conventional pelling ;' or "the traditional pelling" If omeone a k you, "What i the correct pelling of o-and- o?" you would do a ocial ervice by giving a polite but eva ive reply. "Well, the u ual pelling that ha developed among writer of Engli h i o-and- o.' Your inquirer might be intere ted to learn that a common word like good ha been pelled in thirteen different way, according to the Oxford Engli h Dictionary, with even more from Scotti h u age. But, you hould add, it ha become conventional to write "g-o-o-d :' Thi advice doe not amount to a relaxation of tandard, for the attempted ab oluti m cau e blockage in the tudent. The blockage would tend to go away when the tudent become aware of the conventional nature of pelling. Spelling problem would be defu ed. It i curiou that the very common colloquiali m O.K., which had it origin in the phra e oll korrect, doe not eem to hare the perniciou effect of it ource, the word correct. It ha become a very tame word of a ent and ha weakened into the ame en e a `adequate. In fact, the word adequate it elf might be con idered an ab oluti m, for what i more finali tic than fitting ju t right? Yet adequate now commonly mean `barely ufficient : I am propo ing EMA a a popular movement, and I feel fairly ure that it will leave technical philo opher untouched. They will till want to debate the "coherence theory of truth" ver u the "corre pondence theory of truth" and o on. But the ordinary peaker of Engli h could well top aying, "Let' get at the truth" and ay in EMA, "Let' find out what happened." The many philo opher who have talked about "the ab olute" (whatever that could po ibly be) have addled the world with a me of verbiage. The ab oluti tic orientation i the underpinning of the fanatici m that lead to terrori m and war. A cry from the heart ha come from a young Cambodian refugee when he aid : "Adult who are ure they are ab olutely right, they make war over their ab olute rightne." (8) Maladju tment in ocial and per onal relation have the ame ource. The e pattern are deadly eriou, but we can combat them by mean of EMA in a different pirit. It could be good fun to experiment with winnowing out the ab oluti tic term. The "play pirit' habitually motivate much of what we do in language u age, and the "play pirit" could carry EMA along until it became an important factor in our behavior. When we find our elve u ing the very common ab oluti m uch a alway, never, forever, eternity, pure, final, ultimate, and o on, we could

6 12 Et cetera SPRING 1985 ay to our elve, wa that term nece ary? Could we frame our entence in ome other way? It i tempting to perpetrate the aphori m, "Every ab oluti m i a pathology." But methodological hone ty would require u to go on to ay, "including thi one.' Then where would we be? The word pathology may not be appropriate, for we mu t be generou and under tanding in our di agreement. Ab oluti m fit very well into the orientation that are generally accepted in our culture. I am here pleading for the orientation into which ab oluti m do not fit. An attention to terminology-the cutting out of word that carry the ab oluti tic me age-would call our attention to the new orientation. The orientation i what matter, not the choice of particular word. But particular word coach u in our orientation, o I feel ju tified in pre enting the de irability of EMA. Let u go forward fervently in popularizing EMA. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. The New York Time, October 10, 1984, p. Cll. 2. Alfred North Whitehead, Proce and Reality: an E ay in Co mology (New York, 1929), p. X, 3. Ibid., p Alfred Korzyb ki, Science and Sanity (Lanca ter, Pa., 1933), p Deane Starr, in Free Inquiry, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Fall, 1984), p Gary L. McDowell, in The New York Time, October 10, 1984, p. A26, col Luigi Barzini, The European (New York, 1983), pp. 230 and The New York Time, November 9, 1984, p. Al, col. 6.