Royal Bank LetterPublished by Royal Bank of Canada

Vol. 72 No. ‘ JanuaryFebruary 1991

Words, Thoughts and DeedsLanguage has been called the mostpowerful drug known to humanity. Thewords we hear and speak can have a distorting

effect on our points of view. If we do notwant others to take over our minds, weshould watch words closely. And never

mistake their rhetoric for our own ideas ...

Some years ago two schools of psychological theoryengaged in one of those academic disputes that areas intriguing as they are irresolvable. The issue waswhether human thought is formed in words, orwhether people "feel" their way to ideas,unconsciously choosing words to describe theirthoughts as they go along. One side contended thatit is impossible to do any reasoning without usinglanguage. The other argued that animals are capableof rudimentary reasoning even though they areincapable of speech.

The debate was still underway when somebodypointed out that, for all practical purposes, it wasirrelevant. Human beings might or might not thinkin words, but without words, their thoughts mightas well never have been conceived. As the authors ofthe composition textbook Writing and Thinking putit, "thinking is no better or useful than the thinker’sability to use words to communicate. A scientist whoknew the cure for cancer but couldn’t explain it todoctors would be of little comfort to cancer patients,and of no use to the medical profession. A collegestudent who says he knows the answer to a questionbut can’t express it gets just as low a grade as thestudent who frankly says he doesn’t know it."

Though language may not be the basis of thinkingof every kind, it is clearly essential to the kind mostof us do normally. This consists of asking questionsto ourselves and trying to arrive at answers that arereasonably clear in our own minds.

If we go on to share with other people theconclusions we have reached, we must then arrangewords in logical order in the hope that the others can

understand us. Often the act of putting ideas intosentences for outside consumption has the effect ofrefining our thoughts, or of suggesting new avenuesof thought to follow. In this way language serves notonly as a carrier but as a generator of ideas.

To the extent that we think in language, ourthoughts are restricted by the number of words at ourcommand and by our sensitivity to their meaning. Itfollows that to exercise our mental powers fully andto enhance our understanding of life, we shouldexpand and sharpen our vocabularies.

Yet no matter how extensive our knowledge ofwords, we should be aware that we can never exercisecomplete control over them. Words are active,changing, slippery things that do not lend themselvesto machine-like precision. That is why philosopherslike Alfred North Whitehead, whose first disciplinewas mathematics, have insisted that objective truthscannot be expressed in verbal terms.

Even the unexpressed words we keep in our headshave emotional connotations that can distort ourviewpoint. For example, newspapers used to askcelebrities to make lists of the 10 most beautiful wordsin the language. In these "mother," "home,""children," and "love" consistently ranked high, notbecause they sounded particularly beautiful inthemselves, but because of the things for which theystood.

When such words occur in their thoughts, peoplesusceptible to their emotional appeal are less likelyto think matters through in a systematic and objectiveway than to form opinions out of sentiment. The caseof a mother who committed a crime for the love of

her children and in defence of her home might bedecided in the jurors’ minds before they ever go tocourt.

If words are not trustworthy in the privacy of ourheads, they are even less so when they are convertedto speech or writing. The French philosopherMontaigne observed that every word is composed oftwo parts, belonging equally to the speaker and thelistener. The dual nature of language makes itnecessary for participants in any serious discussionto watch carefully the words both they and the otherparty choose.

"If you wish to converse with me, define yourterms," said Voltaire. In The Story of Philosophy,Will Durant commented: "How many a debate wouldhave been deflated into a paragraph if the disputantshad dared to define their terms! This is the alpha andomega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that everyimportant term in serious discourse shall be subjectto strictest scrutiny and definition."

The definition of words has an effect not only onwhat we think, but on how we think. In Explorationsin Awareness, J. Samuel Bois described how, intranslating French to English, he found that there wasno English equivalent of fleuve, for a great riverrunning into the sea. English-speakers had to makedo with the same word to describe the mighty St.Lawrence and a stream one could throw a stoneacross. In a later translation job, however, Boislearned that French could accommodate no distinctionamong the English words "giggle," "titter," and"chuckle." In French, they all were ricaner.

"The moral of the story," he wrote, "is that I don’tsee the same things, I don’t observe the same eventswhen I change my English for my French thinkingtool. Changing my language changes me as anobserver. It changes my world at the same time."

Much is suggested by those words that are includedin a national vocabulary and those that are left out.For instance, according to the expatriate Soviet writerand scholar Azary Messerer, "there is no such wordas privacy in the modern Russian language. The latestand most comprehensive English-Russian dictionary,edited by Professor I. Galperin, translates ’privacy’as ’loneliness, intimacy, or secrecy’ but says nothingabout the right to live free from interference in one’sprivate life."

In noting this omission, Messerer was making anideological point, contrasting the collectivism of theold-line Communists with the individualism of thewestern democracies. His bias towards the latter bringsup one of the basic rules of general semantics: that,as S.I. Haywakawa wrote, "It is important to sortout from any utterance the information given from

the speaker’s feeling toward that information." Doingso helps us to prevent others from manipulating ourthoughts.

Even when we are thinking on our own, however,we would do well to remember that political termsare exceptionally tricky. Take the word "democracy,"of which the American writer Bernard Smith obser-ved: "The words men fight and die for are the coinsof politics, where by much usage they are soiled andby much manipulating debased. That evidently hasbeen the fate of the word ’democracy.’ It has cometo mean what anyone wants it to mean."

True enough. Democracy has cropped up in thenames of some of the world’s most dictatorial juris-dictions, such as the Democratic People’s Republicof Korea and the Democratic Republic of Afghanis-tan. Generations of absolute tyrants have claimed tobe defending democracy as they lined up their oppo-nents in front of firing squads.

"Political" words can also mean drastically diffe-rent things to people according to where they stand.To the Northern abolitionists in the American CivilWar, the words "liberty" and "freedom" meantliberty and freedom for the slaves in the breakawaystates of the Confederacy. To the Confederates, theymeant the liberty and freedom to secede from thefederal union and to maintain slavery.

When it comes to language, the world of politicsis like the world of Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Car-roll’s Through the Looking Glass. In it he tells Car-roll’s heroine Alice that when he uses a word, it meansjust what he chooses it to mean.

"The question is," says Alice, "whether you canmake words mean so many different things."

Humpty Dumpty’s reply is pure realpolitik: "Thequestion is which is to be master -- that’s all."

In his novel 1984, George Orwell presented a pic-ture of a bizarre society in which the "Ministry ofTruth" dispenses words that mean just what the dic-tator, Big Brother, wants them to mean. The statelanguage, Newspeak, turns logic inside-out in brazencontempt for the public intelligence. Hence the uni-versal slogan, "War is Peace."

Orwell wrote his cautionary tale in 1948, reversingthe last two digits of the year to indicate some timelate in the century. Writing in et cetera, the journalof general semantics, in the actual year 1984, com-munications professor Terence P. Moran drew atten-tion to how much the use of language in Americanpolitics had come to resemble Orwell’s speculations:"In which 1984 do we call the MX nuclear missile’the Peacekeeper?"’ he asked. Professor Moran notedthat, when then-President Ronald Reagan ordered thewithdrawal of U. S. Marines from Lebanon after they

had suffered heavy casualties, he called it a "rede-ployment." "This bit of newspeak inspired such his-torical revisions as ’Napoleon’s Redeployment fromMoscow’ and ’Custer’s Last Redeployment,’" Moranwrote.

There is a long tradition of using euphemisms tocover up the real horrors of war. An official dispatchfrom a battlefront might read: "Elements of theFourth Division repulsed attacks from the enemy SixthArmy supported by aerial and artillery bombardment.Casualties on both sides were heavy." This saysnothing of the hundreds of men who had their sto-machs blasted open or their arms, legs or heads blownoff. In a similar vein, an American general in Europeonce referred to civilian casualties as "collateraldamage." An "interdictional nonsuccumber" washow the U.S. Defense Department described a per-son in Viet Nam who had survived bombing attacks.

Short of war, euphemisms have always been usedin politics to candy-coat unpalatable realities. Whilethe words in the mouths of the parties in power are"smoother than butter," as Shakespeare wrote, thelanguage of opposition parties is unadulterated vine-gar. The discerning voter will make allowances forthe motives behind the words when the governmentsays that a proposed policy will lead to broad newuplands of progress and the opposition says of thesame policy that it will bring the ruination of thenation and "the democratic way of life."

Politics, however, is not confmed to parliamentarychambers. We think in political terms constantlywithout being aware of doing so. The power of lan-guage starts to influence our political opinions in earlychildhood. We are all imbued with the prejudices ofthe particular social group into which we were born,and we receive this indoctrination from the languagewe hear.

If early in life we "learn" to associate a certainword like the name of an ethnic group with some-thing objectionable to our group, the negative asso-ciations are likely to stick in our minds when we reachadulthood. No matter what objective evidence weencounter to the contrary, members of such-and-sucha nationality or religion will always be dirty or lazy,drunken or greedy, stingy or crooked, depending onwhich stereotype we apply to which particular group.

These and other opinions such as those on the roleof the sexes are fundamentally political because theimages created by language will loom up in our mindswhen one or the other of these groups makes a bidfor a recognition of rights or draws attention to somepoint of discrimination against them. For the mostpart, our prejudices are unconscious; they are condi-tioned by words we use so frequently that they have

become second nature. Consciously or not, we areunlikely to be very sympathetic or fair to people wehave been talking about in pejorative language all ourlives.

One of the things children learn to do in their pre-school years is to "call names" at those who are dif-ferent from them and their playmates. If they are onthe receiving end of the name-calling, they learn totaunt back: "Sticks and stones will break my bones,but names will never hurt me!" No saying could befurther from the truth.

First of all, words can hurt us emotionally, withan effect deeper and more lasting than a physicalinjury. Secondly, the declaration that words can dono physical harm is fallacious. It is words that causemobs to pick up sticks and stones to break the bonesof the people they have learned to look upon withrepugnance or hatred. Words have been responsiblefor some of the most horrible crimes of humanity.Naziism got its start by calling names.

The Nazis were masters of propaganda, which con-sists largely of rhetoric. Among the definitions of rhe-toric is "language designed to persuade or impress(often with implication of its insincerity, exaggeration,etc.)"

In prison after the abortive Munich putsch, AdolfHitler developed the principles of how to rule men’sminds with artful language. He set about becominga master orator in the full knowledge that, as theEnglish writer Joseph Chatfield said, "Oratory is thepower to talk people out of their sober and naturalopinions."

Hitler knew how to pick the "right" words for hispurposes and to arrange them in slogans which, repea-ted over and over, could utterly overwhelm non-conformity with party doctrine. He further knew howslogans could obviate public scrutiny of policy andanaesthetize the conscience, wiping out every humanconsideration in the interests of "the master race."

Of course, propaganda (the Latin-based word stemsfrom the propagation of the Roman Catholic faith)was practised long before Hitler came on the scenein the 1920s. What was different from his time onwas that propagandists could use mass media suchas radio, film and wire services to reach around theworld. Everyone everywhere became a potential can-didate for what was later known as brain-washing.Then came television, and with it the witch-huntingU. S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who managed toturn the word "Communist" into a terrifying scourge.

Because it slings words at its listeners with such dis-concerting speed, and because the visual images it pre-sents further blur the perceptions, television hasheightened the need to be careful not to take words

at face value. Not that anybody does so entirely;everyone knows that television commercials, like allother advertising, make fulsome use of exaggeration.But while we allow for a degree of hyperbole in adver-tising, we are perhaps less rigorous in discounting themore subtle but no less contrived exaggerations wehear in news and public affairs programs.

Exaggeration is a natural part of language. We allblow words out of proportion to their original mea-ning, and sometimes depart from their meaning enti-rely. A good meal isn’t literally marvellous, which thedictionary defines as "astonishing" or "extremelyimprobable." Nor is a bad meal literally terrible"awful, dreadful, formidable, very great or bad."

Words are often used in a less than literal way toplant desirable ideas. The British Royal Navy, for ins-tance, has traditionally given its ships names likeInvincible and Indomitable, though the Lords of theAdmiralty are well aware that no war ship couldactually be invincible or indomitable. Presumably theyhoped that the sailors aboard them would conductthemselves as if the names proclaimed a simple fact.

These are cases of words meaning not only whatpeople want them to mean, but what people hope theywill mean. Thus a young man will call a girl his swee-theart in the hope, and with the suggestion, that shewill come to fit that description. In black magic, spellsare cast and curses made with words the speaker fier-cely hopes will become reality.

"The old idea that words possess magical powersis false," Aldous Huxley wrote, "but its falsity is thedistortion of a very important truth. Words do havea magical effect -- but not in the ways that the magi-cians supposed, and not on the objects that they aretrying to influence. Words are magical in the way theyaffect the minds of those who use them."

It is to tap into this magic that sloganeers try toplant words in the public mind which producereflexive generalizations. "A good catch word," theAmerican politician Wendell Wilkie once said, "canobscure analysis for fifty years."

Cleverly-chosen language has the effect of sim-plifying ideas, to the relief of those who are intellec-tually lazy. Life is rarely as simple as the languagewe use to describe it. Still, we ail generalize, and bydoing so we fall into the trap of believing that allthings in a certain category are the same: all pigs aredirty, all professors are wise, all women are bad dri-vers. By attaching generalized labels to the picturesthat crop up in our minds, we do an injustice notonly to others, but to our better selves.

According to the prophet of general semantics,Alfred Korzybski, the Indo-European language struc-ture, with its strong emphasis on "is" and "is not,"tends to make for generalizations and snap judgments.We talk of right and wrong, good and bad, etc.,taking little or no notice of the gradations betweenthese extreme states. Such verbal polarization milita-tes against reasonable solutions to problems. Anyonewho suggests a middle way between opposites is likelyto come under tire from both sides.

The first rule of semantics is that words are nothingbut the symbols of things and ideas. To paraphraseKorzybski, language is to reality what the map is tothe territory -- "the map," he kept repeating, "isnot the territory."

It is when words are confused with the things theyrepresent that we run into dangerous delusions. JohnKenneth Galbralth called what results from the subs-titution of a word for a fact a "wordfact."

"It means," he wrote, "that to say sometbdng existsis a substitute for its existence. And to say that some-thing will happen is as good as having it happen ....By bold use of the wordfact, we were able to con-vert South American dictators into bulwarks of thefree world."

In this clamorous day and age, independent-mindedindividuals should be on the constant look-out forwordfacts and other calculated misuses of language.It is not too much for citizens to insist, at least intheir own sovereign minds, that the words employedin political discourse mean what they are cornmonlyunderstood to mean.

If one group calls another "terrorists" or says thatthey are using "violence" or accuses them of "com-mitting genocide," we should decide for ourselves,on the balance of evidence, whether terrorism or vio-lence or genocide is actually being perpetrated. Weshould guard against attempts to hijack our thinkingby slogans, catch-words, or rhetoric designed toinflame our opinions or turn us against enemies manu-factured by "wordfact" techniques.

And we should be ever-conscious of the insidiousdanger of using packaged words as substitutes for ori-ginal ideas. We should not allow others, any morethan we should allow ourselves, to confuse words withthe reality they symbolize. Eternal vigilance as to theuse of words is the price of freedom of thought andexpression. In a democracy, the war against the misuseof words cannot be a purely public one. Each indivi-dual must stand on guard over his or her own mind.