In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [67]
This idea had become popular even before the war. In their influential book, The Meaning of 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 pencil, pencil, pencil, 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,