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On September 11, 2001, at 8:46 A.M., a hijacked airliner crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. At 9:03 A.M. a second plane crashed into the south tower. The resulting infernos caused the buildings to collapse, the south tower after burning for an hour and two minutes, the north tower twenty-three minutes after that. The attacks were masterminded by Osama bin Laden, leader of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, who hoped to intimidate the United States into ending its military presence in Saudi Arabia and its support for Israel and to unite Muslims in preparation for a restoration of the caliphate.
9/11, as the happenings of that day are now called, stands as the most significant political and intellectual event of the twenty-first century so far. It has set off debates on a vast array of topics: how best to memorialize the dead and revitalize lower Manhattan; whether the attacks are rooted in ancient Islamic fundamentalism or modern revolutionary agitation; the role of the United States on the world stage before the attacks and in response to them; how best to balance protection against terrorism with respect for civil liberties.
But I would like to explore a lesser-known debate triggered by 9/11. Exactly how many events took place in New York on that morning in September?
It could be argued that the answer is one. The attacks on the buildings were part of a single plan conceived in the mind of one man in service of a single agenda. They unfolded within a few minutes and yards of each other, targeting the parts of a complex with a single name, design, and owner. And they launched a single chain of military and political events in their aftermath.
Or it could be argued that the answer is two. The north tower and the south tower were distinct collections of glass and steel separated by an expanse of space, and they were hit at different times and went out of existence at different times. The amateur video that showed the second plane closing in on the south tower as the north tower billowed with smoke makes the twoness unmistakable: in those horrifying moments, one event was frozen in the past, the other loomed in the future. And another occurrence on that day—a passenger mutiny that brought down a third hijacked plane before it reached its target in Washington—presents to the imagination the possibility that one tower or the other might have been spared. In each of those possible worlds a distinct event took place, so in our actual world, one might argue, there must be a pair of events as surely as one plus one equals two.
The gravity of 9/11 would seem to make this entire discussion frivolous to the point of impudence. It’s a matter of mere “semantics,” as we say, with its implication of picking nits, splitting hairs, and debating the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. But this book is about semantics, and I would not make a claim on your attention if I did not think that the relation of language to our inner and outer worlds was a matter of intellectual fascination and real-world importance.
Though “importance” is often hard to quantify, in this case I can put an exact value on it: three and a half billion dollars. That was the sum in dispute in a set of trials determining the insurance payout to Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder of the World Trade Center site. Silverstein held insurance policies that stipulated a maximum reimbursement for each destructive “event.” If 9/11 comprised a single event, he stood to receive three and a half billion dollars. If it comprised two events, he stood to receive seven billion. In the trials, the attorneys disputed the applicable meaning of the term event . The lawyers for the leaseholder defined it in physical terms (two collapses); those for the insurance companies defined it in mental terms (one plot). There is nothing “mere” about semantics!
Nor is the topic intellectually trifling. The 9/11 cardinality debate is not about the facts, that is, the physical events and human actions that took place that day. Admittedly, those have been contested as well: according to various conspiracy theories, the buildings were targeted by American missiles, or demolished by a controlled implosion, in a plot conceived by American neoconservatives, Israeli spies, or a cabal of psychiatrists. But aside from the kooks, most people agree on the facts. Where they differ is in the construal of those facts: how the intricate swirl of matter in space ought to be conceptualized by human minds. As we shall see, the categories in this dispute permeate the meanings of words in our language because they permeate the way we represent reality in our heads.
Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it is also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality—the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world. It is about the relation of words to a community—how a new word, which arises in an act of creation by a single speaker, comes to evoke the same idea in the rest of a population, so people can understand one another when they use it. It is about the relation of words to emotions: the way in which words don’t just point to things but are saturated with feelings, which can endow the words with a sense of magic, taboo, and sin. And it is about words and social relations—how people use language not just to transfer ideas from head to head but to negotiate the kind of relationship they wish to have with their conversational partner.
A feature of the mind that we will repeatedly encounter in these pages is that even our most abstract concepts are understood in terms of concrete scenarios. That applies in full force to the subject matter of the book itself. In this introductory chapter I will preview some of the book’s topics with vignettes from newspapers and the Internet that can be understood only through the lens of semantics. They come from each of the worlds that connect to our words—the worlds of thought, reality, community, emotions, and social relations.
Let’s look at the bone of contention in the world’s most expensive debate in semantics, the three-and-a-half-billion-dollar argument over the meaning of “event.” What, exactly, is an event? An event is a stretch of time, and time, according to physicists, is a continuous variable—an inexorable cosmic flow, in Newton’s world, or a fourth dimension in a seamless hyperspace, in Einstein’s. But the human mind carves this fabric into the discrete swatches we call events. Where does the mind place the incisions? Sometimes, as the lawyers for the World Trade Center leaseholder pointed out, the cut encircles the change of state of an object, such as the collapse of a building. And sometimes, as the lawyers for the insurers pointed out, it encircles the goal of a human actor, such as a plot being executed. Most often the circles coincide: an actor intends to cause an object to change, the intent of the actor and the fate of the object are tracked along a single time line, and the moment of change marks the consummation of the intent.
The conceptual content behind the disputed language is itself like a language (an idea I will expand in chapters 2 and 3). It represents an analogue reality by digital, word-sized units (such as “event”), and it combines them into assemblies with a syntactic structure rather than tossing them together like rags in a bag. It’s essential to our understanding of 9/11, for example, not only that bin Laden acted to harm the United States, and that the World Trade Center was destroyed around that time, but that it was bin Laden’s act that caused the destruction. It’s the causal link between the intention of a particular man and a change in a particular object that distinguishes the mainstream understanding of 9/11 from the conspiracy theories. Linguists call the inventory of concepts and the schemes that combine them “conceptual semantics.” 1 Conceptual semantics—the language of thought—must be distinct from language itself, or we would have nothing to go on when we debate what our words mean.
The fact that rival construals of a single occurrence can trigger an extravagant court case tells us that the nature of reality does not dictate the way that reality is represented in people’s minds. The language of thought allows us to frame a situation in different and incompatible ways. The unfolding of history on the morning of September 11 in New York can be thought of as one event or two events depending on how we mentally describe it to ourselves, which in turn depends on what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore. And the ability to frame an event in alternative ways is not just a reason to go to court but also the source of the richness of human intellectual life. As we shall see, it provides the materials for scientific and literary creativity, for humor and wordplay, and for the dramas of social life. And it sets the stage in countless arenas of human disputation. Does stem-cell research destroy a ball of cells or an incipient human? Is the American military incursion into Iraq a case of invading a country or of liberating a country? Does abortion consist of ending a pregnancy or of killing a child? Are high tax rates a way to redistribute wealth or to confiscate earnings? Is socialized medicine a program to protect citizens’ health or to expand government power? In all these debates, two ways of framing an event are pitted against each other, and the disputants struggle to show that their framing is more apt (a criterion we will explore in chapter 5). In the past decade prominent linguists have been advising American Democrats on how the Republican Party has outframed them in recent elections and on how they might regain control of the semantics of political debate by reframing, for example, taxes as membership fees and activist judges as freedom judges . 2
The 9/11 cardinality debate highlights another curious fact about the language of thought. In puzzling over how to count the events of that day, it asks us to treat them as if they were objects that can be tallied, like poker chips in a pile. The debate over whether there was one event or two in New York that day is like a disagreement over whether there is one item or two at an express checkout lane, such as a pair of butter sticks taken out of a box of four, or a pair of grapefruits selling at two for a dollar. The similar ambiguity in tallying objects and tallying events is one of the many ways in which space and time are treated equivalently in the human mind, well before Einstein depicted them as equivalent in reality.
As we shall see in chapter 4, the mind categorizes matter into discrete things (like a sausage ) and continuous stuff (like meat ), and it similarly categorizes time into discrete events (like to cross the street ) and continuous activities (like to stroll ). With both space and time, the same mental zoom lens that allows us to count objects or events also allows us to zoom in even closer on what each one is made of. In space, we can focus on the material making up an object (as when we say I got sausage all over my shirt ); in time, we can focus on an activity making up an event (as when we say She was crossing the street ). This cognitive zoom lens also lets us pan out in space and see a collection of objects as an aggregate (as in the difference between a pebble and gravel ), and it allows us to pan out in time and see a collection of events as an iteration (as in the difference between hit the nail and pound the nail ). And in time, as in space, we mentally place an entity at a location and then shunt it around: we can move a meeting from 3:00 to 4:00 in the same way that we move a car from one end of the block to the other. And speaking of an end, even some of the fine points of our mental geometry carry over from space to time. The end of a string is technically a point, but we can say Herb cut off the end of the string, showing that an end can be construed as including a snippet of the matter adjacent to it. The same is true in time: the end of a lecture is technically an instant, but we can say I’m going to give the end of my lecture now, construing the culmination of an event as including a small stretch of time adjacent to it. 3
As we shall see, language is saturated with implicit metaphors like EVENTS ARE OBJECTS and TIME IS SPACE. Indeed, space turns out to be a conceptual vehicle not just for time but for many kinds of states and circumstances. Just as a meeting can be moved from 3:00 to 4:00, a traffic light can go from green to red, a person can go from flipping burgers to running a corporation, and the economy can go from bad to worse. Metaphor is so widespread in language that it’s hard to find expressions for abstract ideas that are not metaphorical. What does the concreteness of language say about human thought? Does it imply that even our wispiest concepts are represented in the mind as hunks of matter that we move around on a mental stage? Does it say that rival claims about the world can never be true or false but can only be alternative metaphors that frame a situation in different ways? Those are the obsessions of chapter 5.
The aftermath of 9/11 spawned another semantic debate, one with consequences even weightier than the billions of dollars at stake in how to count the events on that day. This one involves a war that has cost far more money and lives than 9/11 itself and that may affect the course of history for the rest of the century. The debate hinges on the meaning of another set of words—sixteen of them, to be exact:
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
This sentence appeared in George W. Bush’s State of the Union address in January 2003. It referred to intelligence reports suggesting that Saddam may have tried to buy five hundred tons of a kind of uranium ore called yellowcake from sources in Niger in West Africa. For many Americans and Britons the possibility that Saddam was assembling nuclear weapons was the only defensible reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. The United States led the invasion in the spring of that year, the most despised American foreign policy initiative since the war in Vietnam. During the occupation it became clear that Saddam had had no facilities in place to manufacture nuclear weapons, and probably had never explored the possibility of buying yellowcake from Niger. In the words of placards and headlines all over the world, “Bush Lied.”
Did he? The answer is not as straightforward as partisans on both sides might think. Investigations by the British Parliament and the U.S. Senate have established that British intelligence did believe that Saddam was trying to buy yellowcake. They showed that the evidence for the British intelligence officers’ belief at the time was not completely unreasonable but that it was far short of conclusive. And they revealed that the American intelligence experts had doubts that the report was true. Given these facts, how are we to determine whether Bush lied? It isn’t a question of whether he was unwise in putting credence in British intelligence, or of whether he made a calculated risk based on uncertain information. It’s a question of whether he was dishonest in how he conveyed this part of his rationale for the invasion to the world. And this question hinges on the semantics of one of those sixteen words, the verb learn . 4
Learn is what linguists call a factive verb; it entails that the belief attributed to the subject is true. In that way it is like the verb know and unlike the verb think . Say I have a friend Mitch who mistakenly believes that Thomas Dewey defeated Harry Truman in the 1948 presidential election. I could truthfully say Mitch thinks that Dewey defeated Truman, but I couldn’t say Mitch knows that Dewey defeated Truman, because Dewey did not, in fact, defeat Truman. Mitch may think he did, but you and I know he didn’t. For the same reason I couldn’t honestly say that Mitch has admitted, discovered, observed, remembered, showed, or, crucially, learned that Dewey defeated Truman. There is, to be sure, a different sense of learn, roughly “be taught that,” which is not factive; I can say When I was in graduate school, we learned that there were four kinds of taste buds, though I now know, thanks to a recent discovery, that there are five. But the usual sense, especially in the perfect tense with have, is factive; it means “acquire true information.”
People, then, are “realists” in the philosophers’ sense. They are tacitly committed, in their everyday use of language, to certain propositions’ being true or false, independent of whether the person being discussed believes them to be true or false. Factive verbs entail something a speaker assumes to be indisputably true, not just something in which he or she has high confidence: it is not a contradiction to say I’m very, very confident that Oswald shot Kennedy, but I don’t know that he did . For this reason factive verbs have a whiff of paradox about them. No one can be certain of the truth, and most of us know we can never be certain, yet we honestly use factive verbs like know and learn and remember all the time. We must have an intuition of a degree of certitude that is so high, and so warranted by standards we share with our audience, that we can vouch for the certainty of a particular belief, while realizing that in general (though presumably not this time) we can be mistaken in what we say. Mark Twain exploited the semantics of factive verbs when he wrote, “The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that aren’t so.” 5 (He also allegedly wrote, “When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now, and soon . . . I will remember [only] the things that never happened.”)
So did Bush lie? A strong case could be made that he did. When Bush said that the British government had “learned” that Saddam had sought uranium, he was committing himself to the proposition that the uranium seeking actually took place, not that the British government believed it did. If he had reason to doubt it at the time—and the American intelligence community had made its skepticism known to his administration—the sixteen words did contain a known untruth. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, speaking in Bush’s defense, said that the statement was “technically accurate,” and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice added that “the British have said that.” But note the switch of verbs: Bush didn’t state that the British had said that Saddam sought yellowcake, which would be true regardless of what Saddam did; he stated that they had learned it, which could be true only if Saddam had in fact gone shopping. The logic of factivity, then, is what Bush’s critics implicitly appeal to when they accused him of lying.
Lying is an impeachable offense for a president, especially when it comes to the casus belli of a terrible war. Could semantics really be that consequential in political history? Is it plausible that the fate of an American president could ever hinge on fine points of a verb? We shall return to that question in chapter 4, where we will see that it depends upon what the meaning of the word is is.
Words are tied to reality when their meanings depend, as factive verbs do, on a speaker’s commitments about the truth. But there is a way in which words are tied to reality even more directly. They are not just about facts about the world stored in a person’s head but are woven into the causal fabric of the world itself.
Certainly a word meaning depends on something inside the head. The other day I came across the word sidereal and had to ask a literate companion what it meant. Now I can understand and use it when the companion is not around (it means “pertaining to the stars,” as in a sidereal day, the time it takes for the Earth to make a complete rotation relative to a star). Something in my brain must have changed at the moment I learned the word, and someday cognitive neuroscientists might be able to tell us what that change is. Of course most of the time we don’t learn a word by looking it up or asking someone to define it but by hearing it in context. But however a word is learned, it must leave some trace in the brain. The meaning of a word, then, seems to consist of information stored in the heads of the people who know the word: the elementary concepts that define it and, for a concrete word, an image of what it refers to.
But as we will see in chapter 6, a word must be more than a shared definition and image. The easiest way to discover this is to consider the semantics of names. 6 What is the meaning of a name, such as William Shakespeare ? If you were to look it up in a dictionary, you might find something like this:
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), n.: English poet and dramatist considered one of the greatest English writers. His plays, many of which were performed at the Globe Theatre in London, include historical works, such as Richard II, comedies, including Much Ado about Nothing and As You Like It, and tragedies, such as Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear . He also composed 154 sonnets. [Syn.: Shakespeare, Shakspeare, William Shakspere, the bard]
And the definition would typically be accompanied by the famous engraving of a doe-eyed balding man with a very small mustache and a very big ruff. Presumably that is not too far from your understanding of the name.
But is that what William Shakespeare really means? Historians agree that there was a man named William Shakespeare who lived in Stratford-on-Avon and London in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. But for 250 years there have been doubts as to whether that man composed the plays we attribute to him. This might sound like the theory that the CIA imploded the World Trade Center, but it has been taken seriously by Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, and many modern-day scholars, and it rests on a number of damning facts. Shakespeare’s plays were not published as serious literature in his lifetime, and authorship in those days was not recorded as carefully as it is today. The man himself was relatively uneducated, never traveled, had illiterate children, was known in his hometown as a businessman, was not eulogized at his death, and left no books or manuscripts in his will. Even the famous portraits were not painted in his lifetime, and we have no reason to believe that they resembled the man himself. Because writing plays was a disreputable occupation in those days, the real author, identified by various theories as Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe, and even Queen Elizabeth, may have wanted to keep his or her identity a secret.
My point isn’t to persuade you that William Shakespeare was not the great English poet and dramatist who wrote Hamlet, As You Like It, and 154 sonnets. (Mainstream scholars say he was, and I believe them.) My point is to get you to think about the possibility that he wasn’t, and to understand the implications for the idea that the meanings of words are in the head. For the sake of argument, imagine that forensic evidence proved beyond doubt that the Shakespearean oeuvre was written by someone else. Now, if the meaning of William Shakespeare were something like the dictionary entry stored in the head, we would have to conclude either that the meaning of the term William Shakespeare had changed or that the real author of Hamlet should be posthumously christened William Shakespeare, even though no one knew him by that name in his lifetime. (We would also have to give full marks to the hapless student who wrote in an exam, “Shakespeare’s plays were written by William Shakespeare or another man of that name.”) Actually, it’s even worse than that. We would not have been able to ask “Did Shakespeare write Hamlet ?” in the first place, because he did by definition. It would be like asking “Is a bachelor unmarried?” or “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” or “Who sang ‘Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees’?” And the conclusion, “William Shakespeare did not in fact write Hamlet, ” would be self-contradictory.
But these implications are bizarre. In fact we are speaking sensibly when we ask whether Shakespeare wrote Hamlet; we would not be contradicting ourselves if we were to conclude that he did not; and we would still feel that William Shakespeare means what it always meant—some guy who lived in England way back when—while admitting that we were mistaken about the man’s accomplishments. Even if every biographical fact we knew about Shakespeare were overturned—if it turned out, for example, that he was born in 1565 rather than 1564, or came from Warwick rather than Stratford—we would still have a sense that the name refers to the same guy, the one we’ve been talking about all along.
So what exactly does William Shakespeare mean, if not “great writer, author of Hamlet, ” and so on? A name really has no definition in terms of other words, concepts, or pictures. Instead it points to an entity in the world, because at some instant in time the entity was dubbed with the name and the name stuck. William Shakespeare, then, points to the individual who was christened William by Mr. and Mrs. Shakespeare around the time he was born. The name is connected to that guy, whatever he went on to do, and however much or little we know about him. A name points to a person in the world in the same way that I can point to a rock in front of me right now. The name is meaningful to us because of an unbroken chain of word of mouth (or word of pen) that links the word we now use to the original act of christening. We will see that it’s not just names, but words for many kinds of things, that are rigidly yoked to the world by acts of pointing, dubbing, and sticking rather than being stipulated in a definition.
The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols. In this worry, the meanings of words are ultimately circular, each defined in terms of the others. As one semanticist observed, a typical dictionary plays this game when it tells the user that “ to order means to command, that to direct and instruct ‘are not so strong as command or order, ’ that command means ‘to direct, with the right to be obeyed,’ that direct means ‘to order,’ that instruct means ‘to give orders’; or that to request means ‘to demand politely,’ to demand [means] ‘to claim as if by right,’ to claim [means] ‘to ask for or demand,’ to ask [means] ‘to make a request,’ and so on.” 7 This cat’s cradle is dreaded by those who crave certainty in words, embraced by adherents of deconstructionism and postmodernism, and exploited by the writer of a dictionary of computer jargon:
endless loop,
n. See loop, endless.
loop, endless,
n. See endless loop.
The logic of names, and of other words that are connected to events of dubbing, allay these concerns by anchoring the web of meanings to real events and objects in the world.
The connectedness of words to real people and things, and not just to information about those people and things, has a practical application that is very much in the news. The fastest-growing crime in the beginning of this century is identity theft. An identity thief uses information connected with your name, such as your social security number or the number and password of your credit card or bank account, to commit fraud or steal your assets. Victims of identity theft may lose out on jobs, loans, and college admissions, can be turned away at airport security checkpoints, and can even get arrested for a crime committed by the thief. They can spend many years and much money reclaiming their identity.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone who has lost his wallet, or inadvertently divulged information on his computer, and now has a doppelgänger using his name (say, Murray Klepfish) to borrow money or make purchases. Now you have to convince a bureaucrat that you, not the impostor, are the real Murray Klepfish. How would you do it? As with William Shakespeare, it comes down to what the words Murray Klepfish mean. You could say, “ ‘Murray Klepfish’ means an owner of a chain of discount tire stores who was born in Brooklyn, lives in Piscataway, has a checking account at Acme Bank, is married with two sons, and spends his summers on the Jersey Shore.” But they would reply, “As far as we are concerned, ‘Murray Klepfish’ means a personal trainer who was born in Delray Beach, gets his mail at a post office box in Albuquerque, charged a recent divorce to a storefront in Reno, and spends his summers on Maui. We do agree with you about the bank account, which, by the way, is severely overdrawn.”
So how would you prove that you are the real referent of the name Murray Klepfish ? You could provide any information you wanted—social security number, license number, mother’s maiden name—and the impersonator can either duplicate it (if he stole that, too) or contest it (if he augmented the stolen identity with his own particulars, including a photograph). As with picking out the real Shakespeare after his familiar biographical particulars had been cast into doubt, ultimately you would have to point to a causal chain that links your name as it is used today to the moment your parents hailed your arrival. Your credit card was obtained from a bank account, which was obtained with a driver’s license, which was obtained with a birth certificate, which was vouched for by a hospital official, who was in touch with your parents around the time of your birth and heard from their lips that you are the Klepfish they were naming Murray. In the case of your impostor, the chain of testimony peters out in the recent past, well short of the moment of dubbing. The measures designed to foil identity theft depend upon the logic of names and the connection of words to reality: they are ways to identify unbroken chains of person-to-person transmission through time, anchored to a specific event of dubbing in the past.
Naming a child is the only opportunity that most people get to anoint an entity in the world with a word of their choosing. Apart from creative artists like Frank Zappa, who named his children Moon Unit and Dweezil, traditionally most people select a prefabricated forename like John or Mary rather than a sound they concoct from scratch. In theory a forename is an arbitrary label with no inherent meaning, and people interpret it as simply pointing to the individual who was dubbed with it. But in practice names take on a meaning by association with the generation and class of people who bear them. Most American readers, knowing nothing else about a man other than that his name is Murray, would guess that he is over sixty, middle-class, and probably Jewish. (When a drunken Mel Gibson let loose with an anti-Semitic tirade in 2006, the editor Leon Wieseltier commented, “Mad Max is making Max mad, and Murray, and Irving, and Mort, and Marty, and Abe.”) 8 That is because of another curiosity of names we will explore in chapter 6. Names follow cycles of fashion, like the widths of ties and the lengths of skirts, so people’s first names may give away their generational cohort. In its heyday in the 1930s, Murray had an aura of Anglo-Saxon respectability, together with names like Irving, Sidney, Maxwell, Sheldon, and Herbert . They seemed to stand apart from the Yiddish names of the previous generation, such as Moishe, Mendel, and Ruven, which made their bearers sound as if they had a foot in the old country. But when the Murrays and Sids and their wives launched the baby boom, they gave their sons blander names like David, Brian, and Michael, who in their turn begat biblically inspired Adams , Joshuas , and Jacobs . Many of these Old Testament namesakes are now completing the circle with sons named Max, Ruben, and Saul .
Names follow trends because people in a community have uncannily similar reactions to the ones in the namepool (as parents often find when they take a child to school and discover that their unique choice of a name was also the unique choice of many of their neighbors). A name’s coloring comes in part from the sounds that go into it and in part from a stereotype of the adults who currently bear it. For this reason, the faux-British names of first-generation Americans became victims of their own middle-class respectability a generation later. In a scene from When Harry Met Sally set in the 1970s, a pair of baby boomers get into an argument about Sally’s sexual experience:
HARRY: With whom did you have this great sex?
SALLY: I’m not going to tell you that!
HARRY: Fine. Don’t tell me.
SALLY: Shel Gordon.
HARRY: Shel. Sheldon? No, no. You did not have great sex with Sheldon.
SALLY: I did too.
HARRY: No, you didn’t. A Sheldon can do your income taxes. If you need a root canal, Sheldon’s your man. But humpin’ and pumpin’ is not Sheldon’s strong suit. It’s the name. “Do it to me, Sheldon.” “You’re an animal, Sheldon.” “Ride me, big Sheldon.” It doesn’t work.
Though postwar parents probably didn’t have great sex in mind, they must have recoiled from the name’s nebbishy connotation even then: beginning in the 1940s, Sheldon, like Murray, sank like a stone and never recovered. 9 The reaction to the name is now so uniform across the English-speaking world that humorists can depend on it. The playwright Marcy Kahan, who recently adapted Nora Ephron’s screenplay to the British stage, notes, “I included the Sheldon joke in the stage play, and all three actors playing Harry got a huge laugh of recognition from it, every night, without fail.” 10
The dynamics of baby naming have become a talking point in newspapers and conversation now that the fashion cycles have accelerated. One of the most popular American names for baby girls in 2006 was unheard of only five years before: Nevaeh, or “heaven” spelled backwards. At the other end of the curve, people are seeing their own names, and the names of their friends and relations, becoming stodgy more quickly. 11 I don’t think I ever felt so old as when a student told me that Barbara, Susan, Deborah, and Linda, some of the most popular names for girls of my generation, made her think of middle-aged women.
In naming a baby, parents have free rein. Obviously they are affected by the pool of names in circulation, but once they pick one, the child and the community usually stick with it. But in naming everything else, the community has a say in whether the new name takes. The social nature of words is illustrated in Calvin’s presumably ill-fated attempt to pass a physics exam:
The way in which we understand “your own words”—as referring only to how you combine them, not to what they are—shows that words are owned by a community rather than an individual. If a word isn’t known to everyone around you, you might as well not use it, because no one will know what you’re talking about. Nonetheless, every word in a language must have been minted at some point by a single speaker. With some coinages, the rest of the community gradually agrees to use the word to point to the same thing, tipping the first domino in the chain that makes the word available to subsequent generations. But as we shall see, how this tacit agreement is forged across a community is mysterious.
In some cases necessity is the mother of invention. Computer users, for instance, needed a term for bulk e-mail in the 1990s, and spam stepped into the breach. But many other breaches stay stubbornly unstepped into. Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s we have needed a term for the members of an unmarried heterosexual couple, and none of the popular suggestions has caught on— paramour is too romantic, roommate not romantic enough, partner too gay, and the suggestions of journalists too facetious (like POSSLQ, from the census designation “persons of opposite sex sharing living quarters,” and umfriend, from “This is my, um, friend”). And speaking of decades, we are more than halfway through the first one of the twenty-first century, and no one yet knows what to call it. The zeroes? The aughts? The nought-noughts? The naughties?
Traditional etymology is of limited help in figuring out what ushers a word into existence and whether it will catch on. Etymologists can trace most words back for centuries or more, but the trail goes cold well before they reach the actual moment at which a primordial wordsmith first dubbed a concept with a sound of his or her choosing. With recent coinages, though, we can follow the twisted path to wordhood in real time.
Spam is not, as some people believe, an acronym for Short, Pointless, and Annoying Messages. The word is related to the name of the luncheon meat sold by Hormel since 1937, a portmanteau from SPiced hAM. But how did it come to refer to e-mailed invitations to enlarge the male member and share the ill-gotten gains of deposed African despots? Many people assume that the route was metaphor. Like the luncheon meat, the e-mail is cheap, plentiful, and unwanted, and in one variant of this folk etymology, spamming is what happens when you dump Spam in a fan. Though these intuitions may have helped make the word contagious, its origin is very different. It was inspired by a sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus in which a couple enter a café and ask the waitress (a Python in drag) what’s available. She answers:
Well, there’s egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam; spam spam spam egg and spam; spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam, or Lobster Thermidor: a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provençale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pâté, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.
You are probably thinking, “This sketch must be stopped—it’s too silly.” But it did change the English language. The mindless repetition of the word spam inspired late-1980s hackers to use it as a verb for flooding newsgroups with identical messages, and a decade later it spread from their subculture to the populace at large. 12
Though it may seem incredible that such a whimsical and circuitous coinage would catch on, we shall see that it was not the first time that silliness left its mark on the lexicon. The verb gerrymander comes from a nineteenth-century American cartoon showing a political district that had been crafted by a Governor Elbridge Gerry into a tortuous shape resembling a salamander in an effort to concentrate his opponent’s voters into a single seat. But most silly coinages go nowhere, such as bushlips for “insincere political rhetoric” (after George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign slogan “Read my lips: No new taxes”), or teledildonics for computer-controlled sex toys. Every year the American Dialect Society selects a “word most likely to succeed.” But the members of the society are the first to admit that their track record is abysmal. Does anyone remember the information superhighway, or the Infobahn ? 13 And could anyone have predicted that to blog, to google, and to blackberry would quickly become part of everyone’s language?
The dynamics of taking from the wordpool when naming babies and giving back to it when naming concepts are stubbornly chaotic. And as we shall see, this unpredictability holds a lesson for our understanding of culture more generally. Like the words in a language, the practices in a culture—every fashion, every ritual, every common belief—must originate with an innovator, must then appeal to the innovator’s acquaintances and then to the acquaintance’s acquaintances, and so on, until it becomes endemic to a community. The caprice in the rise and fall of names, which are the most easily tracked bits of culture, suggests we should be skeptical of most explanations for the life cycles of other mores and customs, from why men stopped wearing hats to why neighborhoods become segregated. But it also points to the patterns of individual choice and social contagion that might someday make sense of them.
The shifting associations to the name for a person are an example of the power of a word to soak up emotional coloring—to have a connotation as well as a denotation . The concept of a connotation is often explained by the conjugational formula devised by Bertrand Russell in a 1950s radio interview: I am firm; you are obstinate; he is pigheaded. The formula was turned into a word game in a radio show and newspaper feature and elicited hundreds of triplets. I am slim; you are thin; he is scrawny. I am a perfectionist; you are anal; he is a control freak. I am exploring my sexuality; you are promiscuous; she is a slut. In each triplet the literal meaning of the words is held constant, but the emotional meaning ranges from attractive to neutral to offensive.
The affective saturation of words is especially apparent in the strange phenomena surrounding profanity, the topic of chapter 7. It is a real puzzle for the science of mind why, when an unpleasant event befalls us—we slice our thumb along with the bagel, or knock a glass of beer into our lap—the topic of our conversation turns abruptly to sexuality, excretion, or religion. It is also a strange feature of our makeup that when an adversary infringes on our rights—say, by slipping into parking space we have been waiting for, or firing up a leaf blower at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning—we are apt to extend him advice in the manner of Woody Allen, who recounted, “I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words.”
These outbursts seem to emerge from a deep and ancient part of the brain, like the yelp of a dog when someone steps on its tail, or its snarl when it is trying to intimidate an adversary. They can surface in the involuntary tics of a Tourette’s patient, or in the surviving utterances of a neurological patient who is otherwise bereft of language. But despite the seemingly atavistic roots of cursing, the sounds themselves are composed of English words and are pronounced in full conformity with the sound pattern of the language. It is as though the human brain were wired in the course of human evolution so that the output of an old system for calls and cries were patched into the input of the new system for articulate speech.
Not only do we turn to certain words for sexuality, excretion, and religion when we are in an excitable state, but we are wary of such words when we are in any other state. Many epithets and imprecations are not just unpleasant but taboo: the very act of uttering them is an affront to listeners, even when the concepts have synonyms whose use is unexceptionable. The tendency of words to take on awesome powers may be found in the taboos and word magic in cultures all over the world. In Orthodox Judaism, the name of God, transcribed as YHVH and conventionally pronounced Yahweh, may never be spoken, except by high priests in the ancient temple on Yom Kippur in the “holy of holies,” the chamber housing the ark of the covenant. In everyday conversation observant Jews use a word to refer to the word, referring to God as hashem, “the name.”
While taboo language is an affront to common sensibilities, the phenomenon of taboo language is an affront to common sense. Excretion is an activity that every incarnate being must engage in daily, yet all the English words for it are indecent, juvenile, or clinical. The elegant lexicon of Anglo-Saxon monosyllables that give the English language its rhythmic vigor turns up empty-handed just when it comes to an activity that no one can avoid. Also conspicuous by its absence is a polite transitive verb for sex—a word that would fit into the frame Adam verbed Eve or Eve verbed Adam . The simple transitive verbs for sexual relations are either obscene or disrespectful, and the most common ones are among the seven words you can’t say on television.
Or at least, the words you couldn’t say in 1973, when the comedian George Carlin delivered his historic monologue arguing against the ban of those words in broadcast media. In a conundrum that reminds us of the rationale for unfettered free speech, a radio network that had broadcasted the monologue was punished by the Federal Communications Commission (in a case that ultimately reached the Supreme Court) for allowing Carlin to mention on the radio exactly those words that he was arguing ought to be allowed to be mentioned on the radio. We have a law that in effect forbids criticism of itself, a paradox worthy of Russell and other connoisseurs of self-referential statements. The paradox of identifying taboo words without using them has always infected attempts to regulate speech about sexuality. In several states, the drafters of the statute against bestiality could not bring themselves to name it and therefore outlawed “the abominable and detestable crime against nature,” until the statutes were challenged for being void for vagueness. To avoid this trap, a New Jersey obscenity statute stipulated exactly which kinds of words and images would be deemed obscene. But the wording of the statute was so pornographic that some law libraries tore the page out of every copy of the statute books. 14
Taboos on language are still very much in the news. While sexual and scatological language is more available than ever on cable, satellite, and the Internet, the American government, prodded by cultural conservatives, is trying to crack down on it, especially within the dwindling bailiwick of broadcast media. Legislation such as the “Clean Airwaves Act” and the “Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act” imposes draconian fines on broadcast stations that fail to censor their guests when they use the words on Carlin’s list. And in an unscripted event that shows the unavoidable hypocrisy of linguistic taboos, the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act was passed on the day in 2004 that Vice President Dick Cheney got into an argument with Senator Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor and Cheney told the senator to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words.
No curious person can fail to be puzzled by the illogic and hypocrisy of linguistic taboos. Why should certain words, but not their homonyms or synonyms, be credited with a dreadful moral power? At the same time, no matter how illogical it may seem, everyone respects taboos on at least some words. Everyone? Yes, everyone. Suppose I told you there was an obscenity so shocking that decent people dare not mention it even in casual conversation. Like observant Jews referring to God, they must speak of it at one degree of separation by using a word that refers to the word. An elect circle of people are granted a special dispensation to use it, but everyone else risks grave consequences, including legally justifiable violence. 15 What is this obscenity? It is the word nigger —or, as it is referred to in respectable forums, the n-word —which may be uttered only by African Americans to express camaraderie and solidarity in settings of their choosing. The shocked reaction that other uses evoke, even among people who support free speech and wonder why there is such a fuss about words for sex, suggests that the psychology of word magic is not just a pathology of censorious bluenoses but a constituent of our emotional and linguistic makeup.
In recent years the Internet has become a laboratory for the study of language. It not only provides a gigantic corpus of real language used by real people, but also acts as a superefficient vector for the transmission of infectious ideas, and can thereby highlight examples of language that people find intriguing enough to pass along to others. Let me introduce the last major topic of this book with a story that circulated widely by e-mail in 1998:
During the final days at Denver’s Stapleton airport, a crowded United flight was canceled. A single agent was rebooking a long line of inconvenienced travelers. Suddenly an angry passenger pushed his way to the desk and slapped his ticket down on the counter, saying, “I HAVE to be on this flight, and it HAS to be first class.” The agent replied, “I’m sorry, sir. I’ll be happy to try to help you, but I’ve got to help these folks first, and I’m sure we’ll be able to work something out.” The passenger was unimpressed. He asked loudly, so that the passengers behind him could hear, “Do you have any idea who I am?” Without hesitating, the gate agent smiled and grabbed her public address microphone. “May I have your attention, please?” she began, her voice bellowing through the terminal. “We have a passenger here at the gate WHO DOES NOT KNOW WHO HE IS. If anyone can help him find his identity, please come to the gate.” With the folks behind him in line laughing hysterically, the man glared at the agent, gritted his teeth, and swore, “[Expletive] you!” Without flinching, she smiled and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll have to stand in line for that too.”
The story seems too good to be true, and is probably an urban legend. 16 But its two punch lines make a nice teaser for oddities of language that we will explore in later chapters. I have already touched on the puzzle behind the second punch line, namely that certain words for sex are also used in aggressive imprecations (chapter 7). But the first punch line introduces the final world that I wish to connect to words, the world of social relations (chapter 8).
The agent’s comeback to “Do you have any idea who I am?” springs from a mismatch between the sense in which the passenger intended his rhetorical question—a demand for recognition of his higher status—and the sense in which she pretended to take it—a literal request for information. And the payoff to the onlookers (and the e-mail audience) comes from understanding the exchange at a third level—that the agent’s feigned misunderstanding was a tactic to reverse the dominance relation and demote the arrogant passenger to well-deserved ignominy.
Language is understood at multiple levels, rather than as a direct parse of the content of the sentence. 17 In everyday life we anticipate our interlocutor’s ability to listen between the lines and slip in requests and offers that we feel we can’t blurt out directly. In the film Fargo, two kidnappers with a hostage hidden in the back seat are pulled over by a policeman because their car is missing its plates. The kidnapper at the wheel is asked to produce his driver’s license, and he extends his wallet with a fifty-dollar bill protruding from it, saying, “So maybe the best thing would be to take care of that here in Brainerd.” The statement, of course, is intended as a bribe, not as a comment on the relative convenience of different venues for paying the fine. Many other kinds of speech are interpreted in ways that differ from their literal meaning:
If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome.
We’re counting on you to show leadership in our Campaign for the Future.
Would you like to come up and see my etchings?
Nice store you got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it.
These are clearly intended as a request, a solicitation for money, a sexual come-on, and a threat. But why don’t people just say what they mean—“If you let me drive off without further ado, I’ll give you fifty bucks,” “Gimme the guacamole,” and so on?
With the veiled bribe and the veiled threat, one might guess that the technicalities of plausible deniability are applicable: bribery and extortion are crimes, and by avoiding an explicit proposition, the speaker could make a charge harder to prove in court. But the veil is so transparent that it is hard to believe it could foil a prosecutor or fool a jury—as the lawyers say, it wouldn’t pass the giggle test. Yet we all take part in these charades, while knowing that no one is fooled. (Well, almost no one. In an episode of Seinfeld, George is asked by his date if he would like to come up for coffee. He declines, explaining that caffeine keeps him up at night. Later he slaps his forehead and realizes, “ ‘Coffee’ doesn’t mean coffee! ‘Coffee’ means sex!” And of course this can go too far in the other direction. In a joke recounted by Freud in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, a businessman meets a rival at a train station and asks him where he’s going. The second businessman says he’s going to Minsk. The first one replies, “You’re telling me you’re going to Minsk because you want me to think you’re going to Pinsk. But I happen to know that you are going to Minsk. So why are you lying to me?”)
If a speaker and a listener were ever to work through the tacit propositions that underlie their conversation, the depth of the recursively embedded mental states would be dizzying. The driver offers a bribe; the officer knows that the driver is offering him a bribe; the driver knows that the officer knows; the officer knows that the driver knows that the officer knows; and so on. So why don’t they just blurt it out? Why do a speaker and a hearer willingly take on parts in a dainty comedy of manners?
The polite dinnertime request—what linguists call a whimperative—offers a clue. When you issue a request, you are presupposing that the hearer will comply. But apart from employees or intimates, you can’t just boss people around like that. Still, you do want the damn guacamole. The way out of this dilemma is to couch your request as a stupid question (“Can you . . . ?”), a pointless rumination (“I was wondering if . . .”), a gross overstatement (“It would be great if you could . . .”), or some other blather that is so incongruous the hearer can’t take it at face value. She does some quick intuitive psychology to infer your real intent, and at the same time she senses that you have made an effort not to treat her as a factotum. A stealth imperative allows you to do two things at once—communicate your request, and signal your understanding of the relationship.
As we shall see in chapter 8, ordinary conversation is like a session of tête-à-tête diplomacy, in which the parties explore ways of saving face, offering an “out,” and maintaining plausible deniability as they negotiate the mix of power, sex, intimacy, and fairness that makes up their relationship. As with real diplomacy, communiqués that are too subtle, or not subtle enough, can ignite a firestorm. In 1991, the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court was nearly derailed by accusations that he had made sexual overtures to a subordinate, the lawyer Anita Hill. In one of the stranger episodes in the history of the Senate’s exercise of its power of advice and consent, senators had to decide what Thomas meant when he spoke to Hill about a porn star named Long Dong Silver and when he asked the rhetorical question “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?” It’s presumably not what the Framers had in mind when they formulated the doctrine of the separation of powers, but this kind of question has become a part of our national discourse. Ever since the Thomas-Hill case put sexual harassment on the national stage, the adjudication of claims of harassment has been a major headache for universities, businesses, and government agencies, particularly when a putative come-on is conveyed by innuendo rather than a bald proposition.
These tidbits from the news and from the net show some of the ways in which our words connect to our thoughts, our communities, our emotions, our relationships, and to reality itself. It isn’t surprising that language supplies so many of the hot potatoes of our public and private life. We are verbivores, a species that lives on words, and the meaning and use of language are bound to be among the major things we ponder, share, and dispute.
At the same time, it would be a mistake to think that these deliberations are really about language itself. As I will show in chapter 3, language is above all a medium in which we express our thoughts and feelings, and it mustn’t be confused with the thoughts and feelings themselves. Yet another phenomenon of language, the symbolism in sound (chapter 6), offers a hint at this conclusion. Without a substrate of thoughts to underlie our words, we do not truly speak but only babble, blabber, blather, chatter, gibber, jabber, natter, patter, prattle, rattle, yammer, or yadda, yadda—an onomatopoeic lexicon for empty speech that makes plain the expectation that the sounds coming out of our mouths are ordinarily about something.
The rest of this book is about that something: the ideas, feelings, and attachments that are visible through our language and that make up our nature. Our words and constructions disclose conceptions of physical reality and human social life that are similar in all cultures but different from the products of our science and scholarship. They are rooted in our development as individuals, but also in the history of our language community, and in the evolution of our species. Our ability to combine them into bigger assemblies and to extend them to new domains by metaphorical leaps goes a long way toward explaining what makes us smart. But they can also clash with the nature of things, and when they do, the result can be paradox, folly, and even tragedy. For these reasons I hope to convince you that the three and a half billion dollars at stake in the interpretation of an “event” is just part of the value of understanding the worlds of words.