The Tyranny of Words

by Stuart Chase

Overview

The pioneering and still essential text on semantics, urging readers to improve human communication and understanding with precise, concrete language.
 
In 1938, Stuart Chase revolutionized the study of semantics with his classic text, The Tyranny of Words. Decades later, this eminently useful analysis of the way we use words continues to resonate. A contemporary of the economist Thorstein Veblen and the author Upton Sinclair, Chase was a social theorist and writer who despised the imprecision of contemporary communication. Wide-ranging and erudite, this iconic volume was one of the first to condemn the overuse of abstract words and to exhort language users to employ words that make their ideas accurate, complete, and readily understood.
 
“[A] thoroughly scholarly study of the science of the meaning of words.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“When thinking about words, I think about Stuart Chase’s The Tyranny of Words. It is one of those books that never lose its message.” —CounterPunch

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544664432
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	420
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Stuart Chase (1888–1985) was an economist and social theorist. His many influential writings include Your Money's Worth, A New Deal, and The Tyranny of Words.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

A WRITER IN SEARCH OF HIS WORDS

I HAVE written several books and many articles, but only lately have I begun to inquire into the nature of the tools I use. This is a curious oversight when one stops to consider it. Carpenters, masons, and engineers who give no thought to their tools and instruments are not likely to erect very durable structures. Yet I follow a procedure common to most writers, for few of us look to our tools. We sometimes study synonyms, derivations, rhythm, style, but we rarely explore the nature of words themselves. We do not inquire if they are adequate instruments for building a durable structure of human communication. Language, whether English, French, or Chinese, is taken for granted, a basic datum. Writers search their memories for a better word to use in a given context but are no more in the habit of questioning language than of questioning the weather. There it is. We assume that we know exactly what we mean, and that readers who do not understand us should polish their wits.

Years ago I read a little book Dy Allen Upward called The New Word. It was an attempt to get at the meaning of "idealism" as used in the terms of the Nobel Prize award — an award for "the most distinguished work of an idealist tendency." Upward began his quest — which was ultimately to lead him over the living world and back to the dawn of written history — by asking a number of his friends to give their personal interpretation of the term "idealism." He received the following replies:

fanatical poetical what cannot be proved altruistic intangible opposite of materialism not practical sentimental something to do with imaginative powers exact true

This gave me pause. I thought I knew what "idealism" meant right enough, and had used it many times with confidence. Obviously, on the basis of Upward's study, what I meant was rarely if at all communicated to the hearer. Indeed, on examining my own mental processes I had some difficulty in determining what I did mean by this lofty word. Thereafter I was unable to escape an uneasy feeling, slight but persistent — like a mouse heard in the wall of a room — that something was wrong. This feeling was strengthened when I stumbled upon a little brochure by H. G. Wells, written I believe for the Fabian Society, which dealt with what he termed "a criticism of the instrument." The forceps of the mind, he said, were clumsy forceps and crushed the truth a little when grasping it. Hum ... something in that. Even more unsettling was the profound observation of Lao Tse:

Those who know do not tell;
To a writer dealing in ideas this aphorism became presently unendurable. Better to put it away on a dark shelf, duly classified as an ancient Chinese wisecrack.

Another matter which distressed me was that I found it almost impossible to read philosophy. The great words went round and round in my head until I became dizzy. Sometimes they made pleasant music, but I could rarely effect passage between them and the real world of experience. William James I could usually translate, but the great classics had almost literally no meaning to me — just a haughty parade of "truth," "substance," "infinite," "absolute," "oversoul," "the universal," "the nominal," "the eternal." As these works had been acclaimed for centuries as part of the priceless cultural heritage of mankind, it seemed obvious that something in my intellectual equipment was seriously deficient. I strove to understand Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Herbert Spencer, Schopenhauer. The harder I wrestled, the more the solemn procession of verbal ghosts circled through my brain, mocking my ignorance. Why was this? Was I alone at fault, or was there something in the structure of language itself which checked communication?

Meanwhile, I had long been aware of the alarming futility of most of the literature dedicated to economic and social reform. As a young reformer I had organized meetings, written pamphlets, prepared lectures, concocted programs, spread publicity with enthusiasm. Those already inclined to my point of view attended the meetings, read the pamphlets, listened to the lectures, adopted the programs, but the apathy of the unconverted was as colossal as it was baffling. As the years went by it became apparent that I was largely wasting my time. The message — and I still believe it was a human and kindly message — had not got through; communication was blocked. What we reformers meant was not what our hearers thought we meant. Too often it was clear that we were not heard at all; noises came through, but no meaning. Few of the seeds I sowed bore out the ancient theory that the seed of truth, once planted, would surely sprout. The damn things would not come up. Why? Why did Mr. Wilson's dubious "war for democracy" go over with a roar, while our carefully reasoned appeals drifted listlessly down empty alleys?

Was there a way to make language a better vehicle for communicating ideas? I read Freud, Trotter, Le Bon, MacDougall, Watson, who gave me some light on motives but little on language. One found in daily life a kind of stereotyped distrust of words, reflected in such phrases as "all generalizations are false, including this one," "campaign oratory," "empty verbalisms," "slogans," "just hot air," "taking the word for the deed." But the distrust was seldom profound; it was usually employed to score off an opponent in a debate or to discredit statements with which one did not agree. Language itself needed to be taken into the laboratory for competent investigation. For a long time I have been puzzled and uneasy about my tools, but only in the past three years have I followed a few hardy pioneers into the laboratory. And as Malisoff has said: "It is a dreadful thing — with no easy escape — to struggle Laocoön-wise with language."

The first pioneer to help me was Count Alfred Korzybski, a Polish mathematician now living in the United States. He had written a book published in 1933 called Science and Sanity, and its jacket carried the endorsement of some of the world's most distinguished scientists: such men as C. B. Bridges, C. M. Childs, H. S. Jennings, Raymond Pearl, B. Malinowski, Bertrand Russell, P. W. Bridgman, E. T. Bell, R. S. Lillie. They agreed that Korzybski was working a rich vein, and that the output might be of great importance. He was exploring the possibility of formulating a genuine science of communication. The term which is coming into use to cover such studies is "semantics," matters having to do with signification or meaning. I shall employ the term frequently in the pages that follow. You had best get used to it, for I think we are going to hear it with increasing frequency in the years before us.

Science and Sanity was harder reading than all the philosophers combined, but it connected with my world of experience. The words no longer went round and round. Korzybski had spent ten years on the book, raiding nearly every branch of science, from neurology to the quantum theory, in a stubborn attempt to find how words behave, and why meaning is so often frustrated. As I read it slowly, painfully, but with growing eagerness, I looked for the first time into the awful depths of language itself — depths into which the grammarian and the lexicographer have seldom peered, for theirs is a different business. Grammar, syntax, dictionary derivations, are to semantics as a history of the coinage is to the operations going on in a large modern bank.

I went on to The Meaning of Meaning by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. People said it was hard reading. The title sounded like more philosophy. On the contrary, philosophers were harried from pillar to post: "The ablest logicians are precisely those who are led to evolve the most fantastic systems by the aid of their verbal technique." The book encouraged me to believe that the trouble had lain not so much with me as with the philosophers. With the tools of semantic analysis, the authors laid in ruin the towering edifice of classical philosophy from Aristotle to Hegel. Psychology (pre-Freudian) emerged in little better repair. Large sections of sociology, economics, the law, politics, even medicine, were as cities after an earthquake.

These three investigators — Korzybski, Ogden, and Richards — agree broadly on the two besetting sins of language. One is identification of words with things. The other is misuse of abstract words. "This is a dog." Is it? The thing that is called "dog" is a nonverbal object. It can be observed by the senses, it can be described, and then, for convenience, the label "dog" can be attached to it, or the label "hund" or "chien" or "perro." But the label is not the animal.

We are aware of this when we stop to think about it. The trouble is that we do not stop to think about it. We are continually confusing the label with the nonverbal object, and so giving a spurious validity to the word, as something alive and barking in its own right. When this tendency to identify expands from dogs to higher abstractions such as "liberty," "justice," "the eternal," and imputes living, breathing entity to them, almost nobody knows what anybody else means. If we are conscious of abstracting, well and good, we can handle these high terms as an expert tamer handles a lion. If we are not conscious of doing so, we are extremely likely to get into difficulties. Identification of word with thing is well illustrated in the child's remark "Pigs are rightly named, since they are such dirty animals."

Ogden and Richards contribute a technical term, the "referent," by which they mean the object or situation in the real world to which the word or label refers. A beam of light comes from a moving animal to my optic nerve. The animal, which I recognize through prior experience with similar animals, is the referent. Presently I add the label and say, "That's a nice dog." Like the term "semantics," I shall use the term "referent" frequently in the following pages. Indeed the goal of semantics might be stated as "Find the referent." When people can agree on the thing to which their words refer, minds meet. The communication line is cleared.

Labels as names for things may be roughly divided into three classes on an ascending scale:

1. Labels for common objects, such as "dog," "chair," "pencil." Here difficulty is at a minimum.

2. Labels for clusters and collections of things, such as "mankind," "consumers' goods," "Germany," "the white race," "the courts." These are abstractions of a higher order, and confusion in their use is widespread. There is no entity "white race" in the world outside our heads, but only some millions of individuals with skins of an obvious or dubious whiteness.

3. Labels for essences and qualities, such as "the sublime," "freedom," "individualism," "truth." For such terms, there are no discoverable referents in the outside world, and by mistaking them for substantial entities somewhere at large in the environment, we create a fantastic wonderland. This zone is the especial domain of philosophy, politics, and economics.

We normally beg the hard question of finding referents and proceed learnedly to define the term by giving another dictionary abstraction, for example, defining "liberty" by "freedom" —"thus peopling the universe with spurious entities, mistaking symbolic machinery for referents." We seldom come down to earth, but allow our language forms or symbolic machinery to fashion a demonology of absolutes and highorder abstractions, in which we come to believe as firmly as Calvin believed in the Devil.

You doubt this? Let me ask you a question: Does communism threaten the world? Unless you are conscious of the dangers lying in the use of abstract terms, you may take this question seriously. You may personify "communism" as a real thing, advancing physically over the several continents, as a kind of beast or angel, depending on your politics. You give a careful, weighted answer or else an excited, passionate answer, to my question. But you have identified the word with the thing, and furthermore you would be very hard put to it to find lower-order referents for the term. I have been searching for them for years. The question as it stands is without meaning. I might about as well ask you: Does omniscience threaten the world? or Does Buzzism threaten the world? If we can agree — if sane men generally can agree — on a series of things in the real world that may properly be summarized by the label "communism," then the question has meaning, and we can proceed intelligently to its discussion. Otherwise not. Can you and I and Jones and Finkelstein come to an agreement about what is meant by "communism"? Try it sometimes with Jones and Finkelstein. In Chapter 11 you will find the surprising results of trying "fascism" on nearly one hundred people. Yet until agreement is reached, the question can liberate plenty of emotion but little real meaning. Jones will follow his meaning and Finkelstein his, and be damned to you.

I read Bridgman's The Logic of Modern Physics and found a similar criticism of language. With four good men in substantial agreement as to the basic difficulty, I seemed to be getting on. "The true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not what he says about it." Scientists, through observing, measuring, and performing a physical operation which another scientist can repeat, reach the solid ground of agreement and of meaning. They find the referents. "If a question has meaning, it must be possible to find an operation by which an answer may be given to it. It will be noted in many cases that the operation cannot exist and the question has no meaning." See them fall, the Great Questions of pre-Einstein science! It is impossible as yet to perform any kind of experiment or operation with which to test them, and so, until such operation be discovered, they remain without meaning.

May time have a beginning and an end?
I breathe a sigh of relief and I trust the reader joins me. One can talk until the cows come home — such talk has already filled many volumes — about these questions, but without operations they are meaningless, and our talk is no more rewarding than a discussion in a lunatic asylum. "Many of the questions asked about social and philosophical subjects will be found to be meaningless when examined from the point of view of operations." Bridgman cites no samples, but we can find plenty on every hand.

Is heredity more important than environment?
I read Thurman W. Arnold's The Symbols of Government and looked at language from another unsettling but illuminating angle. I read E. T. Bell, Lancelot Hogben, Henshaw Ward, Jeremy Bentham, E. S. Robinson, H. R. Huse, Malinowski, Ludwig Wittgenstein, parts of Pareto, Charles A. Beard's The Discussion of Human Affairs, and F. C. S. Schiller's superb destruction of formal logic. I read everything I could get my hands on that dealt with semantics and meaning.

At last I began to know a little about the tools of my craft. Not much, for semantics is still the tenderest of sciences, but something. It proved to be knowledge of the most appalling character. I had hit upon a trail high, steep, and terrible, a trail which profoundly affects and to a degree explains the often tragic failure of men to come to terms with their environment. Most creatures take the world outside as they find it and instinctively become partners with the environment. Man is the one creature who can alter himself and his surroundings, as the geologist John Hodgdon Bradley has wisely observed, yet he is perhaps the most seriously maladjusted of all living creatures. (Some of the fishes, I understand, are badly adapted today.) He is the one creature who is able to accumulate verifiable knowledge about himself and his environment, and yet he is the one who is habitually deluded. No other animal produces verbal monsters in his head and projects them on the world outside his head. Language is apparently a sword which cuts both ways. With its help man can conquer the unknown; with it he can grievously wound himself.

On the level of simple directions, commands, descriptions, the difficulty is not great. When the words mean "Look out!" "There is your food," "Go to the next white house and turn left," communication is clear. But when we hear words on the level of ideas and generalizations, we cheer loudly, we grow angry, we storm the barricades — and often we do not know what the other man is saying. When a Russian speaks to an Englishman unacquainted with Slavic, nothing comes through. The Britisher shrugs his shoulders and both comprehend that communication is nil. When an Englishman speaks to an Englishman about ideas — political, economic, social — the communication is often equally blank, but the hearer thinks he understands, and sometimes proceeds to riotous action.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Tyranny of Words"
by .
Copyright © 1966 Stuart Chase.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Title Page,
Table of Contents,
Copyright,
Acknowledgment,
A Writer in Search of His Words,
A Look Around the Modern World,
Inside and Outside,
Cats and Babies,
Primitive Peoples,
Pioneers — I,
Pioneers — II,
Meaning for Scientists,
The Language of Mathematics,
Interpreting the Environment,
The Semantic Discipline,
Promenade with the Philosophers,
Turn with the Logicians,
To the Right with the Economists,
To the Left with the Economists,
Swing Your Partners with the Economists,
Round and Round with the Judges,
Stroll with the Statesmen,
On Facing the World Outside,
Appendix,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,
Footnotes,