In the Land of Invented Languages

Meaning (1923), C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards blamed all sorts of confusion on “the superstition that words are in some way parts of things or always imply things corresponding to them”—the “Word Magic” problem that Ogden later proposed to solve with his Basic English. Ten years later Count Alfred Korzybski published his Science and Sanity, a dense, jargon-filled tome on the ways in which language “enslaves” us by conditioning our brains to perceive a false reality. More people probably claimed to have read it than actually did—even his followers called the azure-tinted volume “the blue peril”—but Korzybski’s ideas, as interpreted by popularizers like Stuart Chase (of the previously mentioned Tyranny of Words) and S. I. Hayakawa (of the 1941 Book-of-the-Month Club selection Language in Action), rippled through the culture. For a time, any cocktail party guest with pretensions to erudition could pepper his conversation with a “general relativity” here, a “neuro-semantic reaction” there, a melodious “Korzybski” or two to tie it all together, and he would be rewarded with some knowing, serious head nodding.

In the halls of mainstream academia, however, Korzybski’s name got a different reaction. He was an independent scholar without professionally recognized expertise in any of the fields he drew on in creating his boastful, sprawling theory of everything. He published his books and ran his seminars under the rubric of his own Institute of General Semantics, where he promoted techniques for overcoming the thinking errors caused by language—beware of the verb “to be” (“Is-ness is insanity,” he liked to say), mentally subscript the objects you talk about (to remind yourself that there is only pencil₁, pencil₂, pencil₃, and so on and no abstraction “pencil” that covers all cases), and frequently insert an “etc.” (to remind yourself that there is always more to the story than your words would have you believe).

It didn’t help that his seminars had the flavor of a tent revival, complete with emotional manipulation disguised as object lessons (he liked to bring a female student up to the stage and slap her face, then tell the audience that their horrified reaction was “unjustified, as what they have seen turned out to be merely a scientific demonstration of the mechanism of identification”) and testimonials. People in various professions claimed that training in general semantics (as Korzybski’s discipline came to be called) could solve an astonishing array of problems: businessmen said it saved their clients' money; psychiatrists said it cured alcoholism, homosexuality, frigidity, and nymphomania; teachers said it cured reading problems, stuttering, and stage fright; a dentist even said it helped keep fillings in place.

Many people were attracted to the idea that if you could control your language, you could control your mind and solve your problems. (The idea still has some popularity today, in the form of moneymaking self-help ventures like Neuro-Linguistic Programming, a descendant of general semantics.) And they took seriously the warnings about language and mind control coming from the new literature of dystopia. In Ayn Rand’s Anthem, published in 1938, citizens of a futuristic collective society cannot conceive of their own individuality, because they lack the pronoun “I.” In George Orwell’s 1984 (first published in 1949), a totalitarian state controls its subjects through the imposition of Newspeak—people who are denied words for subversive thoughts are rendered incapable of thinking those thoughts.

Poor language. People had always been blaming one thing or another on it, but in the 1930s and 1940s it really took a beating. Before that, in the Esperanto era, language was accused of turning people against each other. The problem was that it prevented mutual understanding, and the solution was to invent or choose a language that everyone could understand. In the post-Esperanto era, language was being accused of everything from genocide to tooth decay. Now the problem with language was its dangerous grip on thought. But what was the solution? Not to invent a new language. No one took that idea seriously anymore. Proposals like Blissymbolics were laughed right out of the arena. (Bliss described a response he received from a prominent general semanticist as “not nice at all”) This time, the solution was to bring language into line with reality, to polish the grime and the rust off the tools, teach people how to use them properly, and put them into service for the truth.

But leaving aside the question of how the truth was to be determined, where exactly was this grime and rust? And how was it to be removed? There were differences of opinion, of course. Ogden had a problem with abstract words posing as truly meaningful words—“fictions” like “causation” and “political” mimicked the behavior of good solid words like “chair” and “red.” The key was to stick to the good solid words. But for Korzybski “chair” and “red” were just as big a part of the problem; the key was to constantly remind ourselves that there was no such thing as a chair (only chair₁, chair₂, chair₃, chair₃ as I experienced it in 1934, chair₃ as I experience it now, and so on) and that red was only a subjective individual experience of a certain wavelength of light.

For Orwell (as expressed in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”), the villains were tired metaphors, long, fancy words, and passive verbs.

Though critics took issue with the various cures proposed for the language disease, no one really questioned the original diagnosis: language was a bad influence on thought. But in the 1950s scholars began to look more closely at that background assumption. Fields like psychology, anthropology, and sociology had picked up the machinery of the hard sciences—empirical observation, measurement, experiment—and were figuring out ways to apply it to the “soft” areas of human behavior: mind, meaning, culture. When it came to the matter of human thought, and what may or may not be influencing it, a modern social scientist had two choices: (1) reject all discussion of “thought” as unscientific, because it was impossible to observe directly (the stance of behavioral psychology, which was having a heyday); or (2) find a way to test your hypothesis using cold, hard data. Sitting in your armchair and musing about words and thought was no longer an acceptable option.

At the same time, the language/thought question was getting fresh attention in academic circles with the posthumous re-publication of the papers of Benjamin Whorf. Whorf had been a chemical engineer, working as an inspector at a fire insurance company, when he began studying linguistics as a hobby. He went on to work with the anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir and to produce highly respected studies of Native American languages. Though Whorf’s papers were published in the premier journals and he was granted an honorary fellowship at Yale, he was still something of an outsider. His primary employment remained at the insurance company, and he never completed an advanced degree. There was also a religious or spiritual angle to some of his linguistic investigations (he was a follower of the eccentric Theosophy movement) that made many of his academic contacts uncomfortable. His ideas about the influence of language on thought made them even more uncomfortable, as they seemed dangerously close to the fashionable language polemics about “the tyranny of words” floating around out there among the linguistically naive masses.

But Whorf (though perhaps naive in other ways) was not linguistically naive. His ideas about language and thought were informed by a highly technical and sophisticated understanding of the grammatical structure of languages that were very different from any European language. He saw what he called “the new, and for the most part probably misguided interest in semantics” as marred by the “parochial viewpoint to which ‘language’ means simply ‘English,’” and he tried to dissociate himself from the “various popular bromides about the misleading nature of words.”

He began to formulate his ideas about the relationship of thought to language when, after finally piecing together a grammatical description of Hopi (an Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Arizona), he realized that he knew how to form plurals but not how to use them. It was like knowing that the English plural is formed by es when a word ends in an “s” sound, but not knowing that it’s inappropriate to refer to a pile of rice as “rices.” He realized that “the category of plural in Hopi was not the same thing as in English, French or German. Certain things that were plural in these languages were singular in Hopi.” For example, something like “day” could not be pluralized in Hopi, because days were experienced one at a time; they could not be assembled into an objective group that could be observed all at once—a Hopi criterion for pluralness. Whorf connected this observation to other features of the language that suggested the Hopi experience of time was not the same as it was for a speaker of an SAE (Standard Average European) language. Could it be that a different way of categorizing things in language reflected a different way of categorizing things in the world?

He never got a chance to fully explore the question. He died of cancer in 1941, at the age of forty-four. He left behind a number of papers on the topic—some published, some unpublished, some written for experts and some for lay audiences—that served as the basis for what came to be called the Whorfian hypothesis (or Sapir- Whorf hypothesis). The science-minded scholars of the 1950s reinterpreted Whorf’s incomplete and complicated exploration of various issues having to do with language, thought, and culture as an empirically testable claim, hence the Whorfian “hypothesis.”

The closest Whorf himself ever got to a hypothesis-style statement was a description of his “linguistic relativity principle,” which held that “users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward