In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [68]
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 chair, chair, chair, chair as I experienced it in 1934, chair 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