Studies in Words

Wow, I should get a prize for blogging so many days in a row.

The title for today's excerpt comes from a book. I was at Hamline Library in the PE section trying to find some language books for my research. The author of this particular book caught my eye - C. S. Lewis. I thought, "what's he doing here in the linguistics section of an academic library? Isn't he the author of kids adventure stories?" Goes to show you how much I know...

I love these old books that sit and collect dust on library shelves. This one was published in 1960 and still has the library check out card in the back cover.  Eleven people checked it out between 1961 and 1978. After that, who knows? Reading habits became much more private with the invention of computerized card catalogs.

So I checked this book out - because I don't have enough books at home to read - and started to read it this evening. Each chapter is about one word and its meanings. The introduction is very interesting with useful ideas when it comes to teaching vocabulary to ESL students. He is very quotable; he opens each paragraph with main ideas, then examples, then summary in the classic style.

From the introduction:
"One understands a word much better if one has met it alive, in its native habitat. So far as is possible, our knowledge should be checked and supplemented, not derived, from the dictionary." What is the difference between reading one of his chapters and looking the meaning of the word up in the dictionary? "I have been able to say more about the history of thought and sentiment which underlies the semantic biography of a word than would have been possible or proper in a dictionary."

His inspiration for this book was to be able to understand older texts better; to understand what an author in 1880 really meant when he used a word. Our modern definition has probably changed. What he's doing in this book is providing a model of how to investigate and understand the meaning or "semantic biography" of a word.

"If we read an old poem with insufficient regard for change in the overtones, and even the dictionary meanings, of words since its date - if, in fact, we are content with whatever effect the words accidentally produce in our modern minds - then of course we do not read the poem the old writer intended. What we get may still be, in our opinion, a poem; but it will be our poem, not his. If we call this 'reading' the old poet, we are deceiving ourselves."

This is true for  every language interaction - my choice of words when I say or write something will provoke different images inside the listener/reader's head.

"Knowledge is necessary. Intelligence and sensibility are not enough...(The intelligent and sensitive reader without knowledge) has ready to hand un-thought-of metaphors, highly individual shades of meaning, subtle associations, ambiguities - every manner of semantic gymnastics - which he can attribute to his author. Where the duller reader simply does not understand, (the first reader) misunderstands - triumphantly, brilliantly." For the wise reader, on the other hand, "the smallest semantic discomfort rouses his suspicions. He notes the key word and watches for its recurrence in other texts. Often they will explain the whole puzzle." I love this - semantic gymnastics, semantic discomfort - these are things that people today still take part in and suffer from.

Just note that it is 1960 and "he" is overused a bit - as if women never read or think. I'm not even going there...

"Prolonged thought about the words which we ordinarily use to think with can produce a momentary aphasia. I think it is to be welcomed. It is well we should become aware of what we are doing when we speak, of the ancient, fragile, and (well used) immensely potent instruments that words are."
Wow! Kapow! Jab! Love it. I just posted that as my Facebook status. Nobody commented.

This next quote reveals a bit of snobbery on his part, but hey, nobody's perfect. He's talking about when words start to change meaning, or lose their edge, (I think he means by general public overuse), we (those of us "in the know") might want to consider doing something about it. "Our conversation will have little effect, but if we get into print... we can help to strengthen or weaken some disastrous vogue word; can encourage a good, or resist a bad, gallicism or Americanism. For many things the press prints today will be taken up by the great mass of speakers in a few years." Ok, so I would not want to encourage censorship, and I hate those organizations that try to control a language. As a linguist, I know that a language is created and formed by the common people who speak it. If the masses like a word or phrase, they will use it no matter who tells them not to. However, I like the positive side of his idea - about encouraging good words. There is really too much use of some words like 'good,' 'bad,' 'thing,' 'pretty,' etc. I have tutored students whose composition teachers prohibit the use of general terms such as these. In the end the students are encouraged to find a word that fits more precisely with what they want to express. I find myself using these words, and I think it is laziness, at least on my part. For my ESL students it is either lack of confidence or lack of vocabulary. In the end, they are always able to come up with something. One of my personal goals as a writer is to use a broader vocabulary. English has the largest in the world, and I need to take advantage more. However - I don't want to sound snooty. Its like walking a tightrope.


In the next section he gets all gory and starts talking about verbicide - the murder of a word (any word, not just a verb). He says there are many ways it happens; inflation, verbiage ("the use of a word as a promise to pay which is never going to be kept. The use of significant as if it were an absolute, and with no intention of ever telling us what the thing is significant of."). I just went to the New York Times website and put the word significant in the search. This word is definitely used in an "all that it implies" way, but we are not often told exactly why something is significant. ("After significant accounting problems," "recovered a significant measure of its previous robustness," "...regard as the most significant literary achievement"). All opinions expressed by an author about a statistic or performance. Anyway - back to Lewis - "Men (and women?) often commit verbicide because they want to snatch a word as a party banner, to appropriate its 'selling quality.'" Wow this political word twisting has been going on for some time. Here I thought it was a modern phenomena. How come we don't catch on????
"But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then to become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative - useless synonyms for good or for bad." I am suddenly self conscious. Am I evaluating or describing. They teach us to do both in college. I guess a good balance, as with all things.

In the next section he brings in the good old tree metaphor. I wonder if anyone has ever written a book about the way that tree metaphor (analogy?) can be used to describe just about anything? "Words constantly take on new meanings. We should picture this process not on the analogy of an insect undergoing metamorphoses, but rather on that of a tree throwing out new branches, which themselves throw out subordinate branches...The new branches sometimes overshadow and kill the old ones but by no means always...The overwhelming majority of those who use the word neither know nor care anything about the tree." I like this analogy. I may use it with ESL learners somehow.

"A child may construct imaginary semantic trees for itself." Or an ESL learner. This is an interesting idea. Maybe help the learners to construct the tree?

The next section is about the "power of context." "It is this most important principal that enables speakers to give half a dozen different meaning to a single word with very little danger of confusion...If ambiguity were not balanced by this power (of context), communication would become almost impossible." Many L2 learners think they can memorize a list of vocabulary words to learn a language, but this is why that doesn't work.
"What seems to me certain is that in ordinary language the sense of a word is governed by the context and this sense normally excludes all others from the mind. The proof of this is that the sudden intrusion of any irrelevant sense - in other words, the voluntary or involuntary pun - is funny. There is a semantic explosion because the two meanings rush together from a great distance; one of them was not in our consciousness at all till that moment. If it had been, there would be no detonation"  This is why things are funny. This is why humor is so hard to get in another language. I love the explosion analogy.

"It is the insulating power of context which enables old senses (meanings) to persist, uncontaminated by newer ones. They live happily by keeping out of each other's way." It is because of context that words have many meanings. literal becomes abstract.

"When a word has several meanings historical circumstances often make one of them dominant during a particular period...The dominant sense of any word lies uppermost in our minds...I call such senses dangerous senses because they lure us into misreadings." Good thing to keep in mind when reading.


"If you want to discover how a man pronounces a word it is no use asking him. Many people will produce in reply the pronunciation which their snobbery of anti-snobbery makes them think the most desirable. honest and self-critical people will often be reduced to saying, 'Well, now you ask me, I don't really know.'Anyway, with the best will in the world, it is extraordinarily difficult to sound a word - thus produced cold and without context for inspection - exactly as one would sound it in real conversation." I have distinct memories of sitting in linguistics classes and we are all trying to produce the 'natural' pronunciation of some sound. Your consciousness of it changes it.

"We define our words only because we are in some measure departing from their real current sense (meaning). One must understand that such definitions are purely tactical. They are attempts to appropriate for one side, and deny to the other, a potent word. You can see the same 'war of positions' going on today. A certain type of writer begins 'The essence of poetry is' or 'All vulgarity may be defined as,' and then produces a definition which no one ever thought of since the world began, which conforms to no one's actual usage, and which he himself will probably have forgotten by the end of the month." I will now be reading and listening closely for people doing this. I love when smart people put things into words for me.