Language in Action
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r LANGUAGE IN ACTION A Guide to ACCURATE THINKING READING and WRITING 5. /. Haya\awa ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY CHICAGO, ILLINOIS NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 1947 COPYRIGHT, 1939, 1940, BY S. I. HAYAKAWA COPYRIGHT, I94I, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. All rights reserved. No part of this hook may he rc- produced in any form, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission in ivriting from the publisher. [h • 10 • 46] PHINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PREFACE WHAT this book hopes to do is to offer a general system for clearing the mind of harmful obstructions. It is an attempt to apply certain scientific and literary principles, or, as we may call them, semantic principles, to the thinking, talking, listening, reading, and writing we do in everyday life. Everyone knows how an engine, although in perfect repair, can overheat, lose its efficiency, and stop as the result of in- ternal obstructions—sometimes even very minute ones. Every- one has noticed, too, how human minds, also apparendy in perfect repair, often overheat and stop as the result of dogmas, received opinions, or private obsessions. Sometimes a set of obsessions may seize multitudes of people at once, so that hysteria becomes epidemic and nations go mad. The recur- rence of such disorders tempts many of us to conclude that there are fundamental and incurable defects in "human na- ture." The fudlity of such an attitude needs hardly to be re- marked upon. Many modern studies, notably in psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and literary criticism, reveal to us the nature and origin of these obstructions in our intellectual ma- chinery. Can we not, by seeking and removing them, get it to run more efficiently.? We do not scold an engine for over- heating, any more than we scold a man for having a fever. Are we getting anywhere by merely scolding each other for "lack of principle," "stupidity," "intellectual laziness," and all the other sins we accuse each other oi? The trouble human beings have in learning anything, whether from discussion, from experience, from historical events, from books, or from teachers, does not as a rule arise from the intrinsic difficulty of the lessons to be learned. It IV PREFACE arises rather from the fact that before any new notions can be grasped, we have so much to z^wlearn: our cherished senti- mentahties, our inherited dogmas, our superstitions, our pet intellectual cliches—all serving to nullify, distort, or caricature beyond recognition the lessons we receive. As an American humorist has said, "What's wrong with most people is not their ignorance, but the number of things they know which ain't so." Perhaps the best time for the systematic study of semantic principles is early in the college course. The freshman enters college wide open to new ideas and new techniques, eager to have his intellectual machinery overhauled and made ready for the exacting tasks ahead. And in fact, experimental tryout of Language in Action in two preliminary editions which were used by some five thousand students in nearly fifty colleges—chiefly in freshman English—clearly indicates the advantage of such early application of semantic principles. These semantic principles I have drawn mainly from the "General Semantics" (or "non-Aristotelian system") of Alfred Korzybski. I have also drawn considerably from the work done in more specialized fields of semantics by other distin- guished writers: especially I. A. Richards, C. K. Ogden, Bronislaw Malinowski, Leonard Bloomfield, Eric Temple Bell, Thurman Arnold, Jean Piaget, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Karl Brit- ton, and Rudolf Carnap. The necessity of synthesizing the often conflicting termi- nologies and sometimes conflicting views of these and other authorities has produced a result that will probably com- pletely satisfy none of them. I make here my apologies to them all for the liberties I have taken with their work: the omis- sions, the distortions, the changes of emphasis, which in some cases are so great that the originators of the theories may well have difficulty in recognizing them as their own. If mistaken impressions have been given of any of their views, or if. PREFACE V through the omission of quotation marks around words of misleading implications (such as "mind," "intellect," "emo- tion"), I have increased rather than reduced the difficulties of the subject, the fault is mine. Whenever such unscientific terms have been used, however, they have been the result of the exigencies of idiomatic expression rather than the result of willful negligence. I have usually attempted (although not always successfully, perhaps) to remove in the surrounding context the erroneous implications of popular terminology. In an attempt at popular synthesis such as this, I have thought it wiser not to try to make individual acknowledg- ments of my borrowings, since this could hardly be done without making the pages unduly formidable in appearance. Therefore the following brief list of works to which I am es- pecially indebted will have to serve in lieu of footnotes and a more detailed bibliography. Thurman W. Arnold, The Symbols of Government, Yale Uni- versity Press, 1935. The Folklore of Capitalism, Yale University Press, 1937. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, Oxford University Press, 1936. Eric Temple Bell, The Search for Truth, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1934- Men of Mathematics, Simon and Schuster, 1937. Leonard Bloomfield, Language, Henry Holt and Company, 1933. Boris E. Bogoslovsky, The Technique of Controversy, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928. P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, The Macmillan Company, 1927. Karl Britton, Communication: A Philosophical Study of Language, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939. Rudolf Carnap, Philosophy and Logical Syntax, Psyche Miniatures (London), 1935. Stuart Chase, The Tyranny of Words, Harcourt, Brace and Com- pany, 1938. VI PREFACE Felix S. Cohen, "Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Ap- proach," Columbia Law Review, Vol. 35, pp. 809-849 (June, 1935)- Committee on the Function of English in General Education, Language in General Education (Report for the Commission on Secondary School Curriculum), D. Appleton-Century Company, 1940. John Dewey, How We Thin\, D. C. Heath and Company, 1933. William Empson, Seven "Types of Ambiguity, Chatto and Windus (London), 1930. Ernest Fenellosa, The Chinese Written Character (ed. Ezra Pound), Stanley Nott (London), 1936. Jerome Frank, Law and the Modern Mind, Brentano's, 1930 (also Tudor Publishing Company, 1936). Lancelot Hogben, Mathematics for the Million, W. W. Norton and Company, 1937. T. E. Hulme, Speculations, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1924. H. R. Huse, The Illiteracy of the Literate, D. Appleton-Century Company, 1933. Wendell Johnson, Language and Speech Hygiene: An Application of General Semantics, Institute of General Semantics (Chi- cago), 1939. Alfred Korzybski, The Manhood of Humanity, E. P. Dutton and Company, 1921. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, Science Press Printing Com- pany (Lancaster, Pa.), 1933. Second edition, 1941. Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, Chatto and Windus (London), 1932. Irving J. Lee, "General Semantics and Public Speaking," Quarterly journal of Speech, December, 1940. Vernon Lee, The Handling of Words, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1923.^ Lucien Levy-Bruhl, How Natives Thin\, Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. Kurt Lewin, Principles of Topological Psychology, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1936. PREFACE Vll B. Malinowski, "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Lan- guages," Supplement I in Ogden and Richards' The Meaning of Meaning. C. K. Ogden, Opposition: A Linguistic and Psychological Analysis, Psyche Miniatures (London), 1932. C. K. Ogden and \. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, Har- court. Brace and Company, third edition, revised, 1930. Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926. The Child's Conception of the World, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929. Oliver L. Reiser, The Promise of Scientific Humanism, Oskar Piest (Nevi' York), 1940. L A. Richards, Science and Poetry, W. W, Norton and Company, 1926. Practical Criticism, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929. The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Oxford University Press, 1936. Interpretation in Teaching, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938. James Harvey Robinson, The Mind in the Maying, Harper and Brothers, 1921. Edward Sapir, Language, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, The Standardization of Error, W. W. Norton and Company, 1927. Allen Upward, The New Word: An Open Letter Addressed to the Swedish Academy in Stoc\holm on the Meaning of the Word IDEALIST, Mitchell Kennerley (New York), 1910. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Modern Library. A. P. Weiss, The Theoretical Basis of Human Behavior, R. G. Adams and Company (Columbus, Ohio), 1925. V. Welby, What Is Meaning? Macmillan and Company, 1903. I am deeply indebted to many friends and colleagues throughout the United States for their suggestions and criti- cism, both by letter and in conversation, during the prepara- tion of this book. I am grateful, too, to Professor C. Wright Vlll PREFACE Thomas o£ the University of Wisconsin and to Professor Walter Hendricks of the Illinois Institute of Technology, who, by encouraging my inquiries in this direction and by offering me the opportunity to present these materials in the classroom, did much to make this book possible. My greatest indebted- ness, however, is to Alfred Korzybski. Without his system of General Semantics, it appears to me difficult if not impossible to systematize and make usable the array of linguistic infor- mation, much of it new, now available from all quarters, scientific, philosophical, and literary. His principles have in one way or another influenced almost every page of this book, and his friendly criticisms and patient comments have facili- tated at every turn the task of writing it. ' ° S. I. H. Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago 4J CONTENTS A STORY WITH A MORAL I 1.