“There are scores of human insects who are ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will of God on any possible subject."
- George Bernard Shaw
I have often referred to George Carlin as the finest, most insightful non-academic linguist in the English language.
Fun Stuff
Mostly all the public sees of linguistics is what I call "fun" or "schoolmarm" linguistics.
Yes, there have been very insightful books on verbal self-defense by Suzette Haden Elgin, as well as much useful language study by Deborah Tannen. Other than that, linguists are silent, except for the irrepressible Chomsky, one of the most overrated minds of all time (though I agree with much of his criticism of American imperialism).
What we see in “fun” linguistics is not serious pursuit of the truth via the tools of linguistics…but cocktail party chatter. Fun linguistics is preoccupied with questions such as...
- Which of two expressions is correct (or “more correct”?)
- Where did this word or expression come from?
- What is the trajectory of the current cliché or buzzword?
- What slogan or saying has this or that celebrity made popular (e.g., throw under the bus)?
- What are the many meanings of this word or phrase?
That's all I ever see. It's fun stuff, doesn't hurt anybody or ruffle any feathers. William Safire has made a second livelihood out of it, and more power to him. But he is not the only language maven in the land.
George Carlin did his share of fun linguistics and language oddities "It not a 'near miss' -- it's a NEAR COLLISION!"), but he went way beyond that. Again and again he skewered dishonesty and hypocrisy in language.
Path to Truth
What about linguistics not as a source of cocktail party chatter... or as a way to play linguistic "gotcha" games of correctness and one-upmanship -- but as a legitimate branch of knowledge, as the search for truth?
What do the facts of language tell us about ourselves and the way we shape our world and manipulate each other? If the subjects are never discussed, then all the bullshit and manipulation can continue unquestioned, and for some people that is unquestionably a good thing.
It is good to keep certain kinds of knowledge from people.
Three of the properties of language to which most people are quite blind (they will be considered in future posts) are:
- the ability to talk about things that are not there;
- the ability to assign multiple labels to the same reality;
- and the ability to comprehend multiple realities under one label (i.e., have different meanings), depending on one's feelings and perspective.
Let us first consider our ability to talk about things that are not there, one of the key differentiating factors between human and animal communication – and the one that enables to traffic in BULLSHIT, hereafter BS.
Comic/magic masters Penn and Teller say it right out – bullshit. In fact, it’s the title of their TV show. They’re hard-core skeptics, secular humanists, and libertarians. My kind of guys. But I’ll mostly go with the acronym, if only for brevity, because I’ll be referring to it a lot.
Numerous linguistically and rhetorically sophisticated people have tried to define this familiar but elusive form of linguistic behavior. A quick Web search will help you find these other sources. My purpose here is to provide an original formulation.
BS Defined
Hence my definition of BS: Bullshit is song passed off as fact. It may be deceptive, if the purveyors don’t believe their own BS. But it may be innocent, in cases where they actually do believe it (or try to, encouraged by group pressure like religious services and political rallies). Either way, it’s BS.
Facts
A fact, for purposes of this discussion, is word or a set of words that can be conventionally applied to a specific thing or situation. The key word here is "conventionally." A statement – such as the commonplace "Humans breathe air." -- can be a highly conventional if not universally accepted fact. Without a background of agreed-upon facts, we would not be able to conduct daily life.
However, many of our worst cultural, religious, and political disagreements are founded on disagreement about the manner in which a word or words should be applied to a particular reality. A recent example, involving an increase of troops in Iraq, is all the discussion about the avoidance of “escalation” and the use of “surge.”
Either way, more soldiers. But the one is what we did in Vietnam, so we must not do it again, even though the word could be applied to the same reality.
