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\frontmatter

\title{\Huge \bfseries Less Than Words Can Say}
\author{\huge Richard Mitchell}
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\begin{quote}
``The wittiest, the most brilliant and, probably the most penetrating
discussion now available of our growing American illiteracy. This book must
be read {\itshape at} once\ldots '' --- Clifton Fadiman
\end{quote}

\begin{quote}
``If English is saved, he will be one of its saviors.'' --- Edwin
Newman
\end{quote}

\begin{quote}
``\ldots by far the most entertaining, intelligent, and above all, the most
important work on the deplorable state of American English\ldots '' ---
Thomas H. Middleton
\end{quote}


{\itshape In Less Than Words Can Say}, Richard Mitchell lets rip the most
devastating expose to date of our rampant misuse of English. A Don Quixote
--- Savonarola might be more apt --- of language, he wages war on its
perverters, from teachers and deans to politicians and bureaucrats, whose
consistently overblown prose offers us inanity in the guise of wisdom.

Mitchell's cantankerous crusade indicts government agency ``chairs''
for the intimidating and obfuscating ``legalese'' of their profession,
obsequious grantseekers who supplicate foundations in time-honored cant,
and aspiring academics who speak in the Divine Passive.

According to Mitchell, this bureaucratic jargon is turning us into a nation
of baffled, inept, frustrated, and --- ultimately --- violent people,
and the public schools are to blame. For the past thirty-five years, they
have taught children to socialize rather than to read, write, and cipher
--- the only disciplines that foster clear language and logical thought.
Mitchell's alarming conclusion is that our schools are turning out illiterates
who will never manage their lives --- because, lacking ``the power
of language,'' they can't think.

Richard Mitchell is a professor of English at Glassboro State College and
editor and publisher of the controversial monthly publication {\itshape The Underground
Grammarian.} His newest book is {\itshape The Graves of Academe.
}

\tableofcontents

\chapter{Foreword}

A colleague sent me a questionnaire. It was about my goals in teaching,
and it asked me to assign values to a number of beautiful and inspiring
goals. I was told that the goals were pretty widely shared by professors
all around the country.

Many years earlier I had returned a similar questionnaire, because the man
who sent it had promised, in writing, to ``analize'' my ``input.''
That seemed appropriate, so I put it in. But he didn't do as he had promised,
and I had lost all interest in questionnaires.

This one intrigued me, however, because it was lofty. It spoke of a basic
appreciation of the liberal arts, a critical evaluation of society, emotional
development, creative capacities, students' self-understanding, moral character,
interpersonal relations and group participation, and general insight into
the knowledge of a discipline. Unexceptionable goals, every one. Yet it
seemed to me, on reflection, that they were none of my damned business.
It seemed possible, even likely, that some of those things might flow from
the study of language and literature, which {\bfseries is}  my damned business,
but they also might not. Some very well-read people lack moral character
and show no creative capacities at all, to say nothing of self-understanding
or a basic appreciation of the liberal arts. So, instead of answering the
questionnaire, I paid attention to its language; and I began by asking myself
how ``interpersonal relations'' were different from ``relations.''
Surely, I thought, our relations with domestic animals and edible plants
were not at issue here; why specify them as ``interpersonal''? And
how else can we ``participate'' but in groups? I couldn't answer.

I asked further how a ``basic'' appreciation was to be distinguished
from some other kind of appreciation. I recalled that some of my colleagues
were in the business of {\bfseries teaching}  appreciation. It seemed all too
possible that they would have specialized their labors, some of them teaching
elementary appreciation and others intermediate appreciation, leaving to
the most exalted members of the department the senior seminars in advanced
appreciation, but even that didn't help with basic appreciation. It made
about as much sense as blue appreciation.

As I mulled this over, my eye fell on the same word in the covering letter,
which said, ``We would appreciate having you respond to these items.''
Would they, could they, ``basically appreciate'' having me respond
to these items? Yes, I think they could. And what is the appropriate response
to an item? Would it be a basic response?

Suddenly I couldn't understand anything. I noticed, as though for the first
time, that the covering letter promised ``to complete the goals and
objectives aspect of the report.'' What is a goals aspect? An objectives
aspect? How do you complete an aspect? How seriously could I take a mere
aspect, when my mind was beguiled by the possibility of a basic aspect?
Even of a basic goals and basic objectives basic aspect?

After years of fussing about the pathetic, baffled language of students,
I realized that it was not in their labored writings that bad language dwelt.
{\bfseries This}, this inane gabble, this was bad language. Evil language. Here
was a man taking the public money for the work of his mind and darkening
counsel by words without understanding.

Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and
become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his
fellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for
all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond
which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical
waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.

This man had offered me inanity. I had almost seized it. If I told you that
this little book would provide {\bfseries you}  with general insight into the
knowledge of a discipline, would you read on? If so, then you had {\bfseries better
} read on, for you are in danger. People all around you are offering inanity,
and you are ready to seize it, like any well-behaved American consumer dutifully
swallowing the best advertised pill. You are, in a certain sense, unconscious.

Language is the medium in which we are conscious. The speechless beasts
are aware, but they are not conscious. To be conscious is to ``know
with'' something, and a language of some sort is the device with which
we know. More precisely, it is the device with which we {\bfseries can}  know.
We don't have to. We can, if we please, speak of general insight into the
knowledge of a discipline and forgo knowing.

Consciousness has degrees. We can be wide awake or sound asleep. We can
be anesthetized. He is not fully conscious who can speak lightly of such
things as basic appreciations and general insights into the knowledge
of a discipline. He wanders in the twilight sleep of knowing where insubstantial
words, hazy and disembodied, have fled utterly from things and ideas. His
is an attractive world, dreamy and undemanding, a Lotus-land of dozing addicts.
They blow a little smoke our way. It smells good. Suddenly and happily
we realize that our creative capacities and self-understanding yearn after
basic appreciations and general insights. We nod, we drowse, we fall asleep.

I am trying to stay awake.

\mainmatter

\chapter{The Worm in the Brain}

There's an outrageous but entertaining assertion about language and the
human brain in Carl Sagan's {\itshape Dragons of Eden.} It is possible, Sagan
says, to damage the brain in precisely such a way that the victim will lose
the ability to understand the passive or to devise prepositional phrases
or something like that. No cases are cited, unfortunately---it would be
fun to chat with some victim---but the whole idea is attractive, because
if it were true it would explain many things. In fact, I can think of no
better way to account for something that happened to a friend of mine ---
and probably to one of yours too.

He was an engaging chap, albeit serious. We did some work together ---
well, not exactly work, committee stuff --- and he used to send me a note
whenever there was to be a meeting. Something like this: ``Let's meet
next Monday at two o'clock, OK?'' I was always delighted to read such
perfect prose.

Unbeknownst to us all, however, something was happening in that man's brain.
Who can say what? Perhaps a sleeping genetic defect was stirring, perhaps
some tiny creature had entered in the porches of his ear and was gnawing
out a home in his cranium. We'll never know. Whatever it was, it had, little
by little, two effects. At one and the same time, he discovered in himself
the yearning to be an assistant dean pro tem, and he began to lose the power
of his prose. Ordinary opinion, up to now, has always held that one of these
things, either one, was the cause of the other. Now we can at last guess
the full horror of the truth. {\bfseries Both}  are symptoms of serious trouble
in the brain.

Like one of these Poe characters whose friends are all doomed, I watched,
helpless, the inexorable progress of the disease. Gradually but inevitably
my friend was being eaten from within. In the same week that saw his application
for the newly created post of assistant dean pro tem, he sent me the following
message: ``This is to inform you that there'll be a meeting next Monday
at 2:00.'' Even worse, much worse, was to come.

A week or so later it was noised about that he would indeed take up next
semester a new career as a highranking assistant dean pro tem. I was actually
writing him a note of congratulation when the campus mail brought me what
was to be his last announcement of a meeting of our committee. Hereafter
he would be frying fatter fish, but he wanted to finish the business at
hand. His note read: ``Please be informed that the Committee on Memorial
Plaques will meet on Monday at 2:00.''

I walked slowly to the window, his note in my hand, and stared for a while
at the quad. The oak trees there had been decimated not long before by a
leak in an underground gas line. The seeping poison had killed their very
roots, but they had at least ended up as free firewood for the faculty.
Pangloss might have been right, after all, and, calamity that it was, this
latest message spared me the trouble of writing the congratulatory note
and even afforded me a glimpse of a remarkably attractive young lady straying
dryad-fashion through the surviving oaks. Things balance out.

You would think, wouldn't you, that the worm or whatever had at last done
its work, that the poor fellow's Hydification was complete and his destruction
assured. No. It is a happy mercy that most of us cannot begin to imagine
the full horror of these ravaging disorders. To this day that man still
sends out little announcements and memos about this and that. They begin
like this: ``You are hereby informed\ldots '' Of what, I cannot say,
since a combination of delicacy and my respect for his memory forbid that
I read further.

It's always a mistake to forget William of Occam and his razor. Look first
for the simplest explanation that will handle the facts. I had always thought
that perfectly normal human beings turned into bureaucrats and administrators
and came to learn the language of that tribe through some exceedingly complicated
combination of nature and nurture, through imitative osmosis and some flaw
of character caused by inappropriate weaning. Piffle. These psychologists
have captured our minds and led us into needless deviousness. The razor
cuts to the heart of things and reveals the worm in the brain.

Admittedly, that may be a slight oversimplification. It may be that the
decay of language and the desire to administrate are not merely concomitant
symptoms of one and the same disease, but that {\bfseries one}  is a symptom and
the other a symptom of the symptom. Let's imagine what deans, who like to
imitate government functionaries, who, in their turn, like to imitate businessmen,
who themselves seem to like to imitate show-business types, would call a
``scenario.''

There you sit, minding your own business and hurting no man. All at once,
quite insensibly, the {\bfseries thing}  creeps into your brain. It might end
up in the storage shelves of the subjunctive or the switchboard of the nonrestrictive
clauses, of course, but in your case it heads for the cozy nook where the
active and passive voices are balanced and adjusted. There it settles in
and nibbles a bit here and a bit there. In our present state of knowledge,
still dim, we have to guess that the active voice is tastier than the passive,
since the destruction of the latter is very rare but of the former all too
common.

So there you are with your active verbs being gnawed away. Little by little
and only occasionally at first, you start saying things like: ``I am
told that\ldots '' and ``This letter is being written because\ldots '' This habit has subtle effects. For one thing, since passives always
require more words than actives, anything you may happen to write is longer
than it would have been before the attack of the worm. You begin to suspect
that you have a lot to say after all and that it's probably rather important.
The suspicion is all the stronger because what you write has begun to sound
--- well, sort of ``official.'' ``Hmm,'' you say to yourself,
``Fate may have cast my lot a bit below my proper station,'' or,
more likely, ``Hmm. My lot may have been cast by Fate a bit below my
proper station.''

Furthermore, the very way you consider the world, or the very way in which
the world is considered by you, is subtly altered. You used to see a world
in which birds ate worms and men made decisions. Now it looks more like
a world in which worms are eaten by birds and decisions are made by men.
It's almost a world in which victims are put forward as ``doers''
responsible for whatever may befall them and actions are almost unrelated
to those who perform them. But only almost. The next step is not taken until
you learn to see a world in which worms are eaten and decisions made and
{\bfseries all}  responsible agency has disappeared. Now you are ready to be an
administrator.

This is a condition necessary to successful administration of any sort and
in any calling. Letters are written, reports are prepared, decisions made,
actions taken, and consequences suffered. These things happen in the world
where agents and doers, the responsible parties around whose throats we
like our hands to be gotten, first retreat to the remoter portions of prepositional
phrases and ultimately disappear entirely. A too-frequent use of the passive
is not just a stylistic quirk; it is the outward and visible sign of a certain
weltanschauung.

And now that it is {\bfseries your}  weltanschauung (remember the worm has been
gnawing all this time), you discover that you are suited to the life of
the administrator. You'll fit right in.

Therefore, we may say that it is not the worm in the skull that causes deans
and managers and vice presidents, at least not directly. The worm merely
causes the atrophy of the active and the compensatory dominance of the passive.
(Through a similar compensatory mechanism, three-legged dogs manage to walk,
and the language of the typical administrator is not very different from
the gait of the three-legged dog, come to think of it.) The dominance of
the passive causes in the victim an alteration of philosophy, which alteration
is itself the thing that both beckons him to and suits him for the work
of administration. And there you have it. Thanks to Carl Sagan and a little
help from William of Occam, we understand how administrators come to be.

You may want to object that a whole view of the world and its meanings can
hardly be importantly altered by a silly grammatical form. If so, you're
just not thinking. Grammatical forms are {\bfseries exactly}  the things that
make us understand the world the way we understand it. To understand the
world, we make propositions about it, and those propositions are both formed
and limited by the grammar of the language in which we propose.

To see how this works, let's imagine an extreme case. Suppose there is after
all a place in the brain that controls the making and understanding of prepositional
phrases. Suppose that Doctor Fu Manchu has let loose in the world the virus
that eats that very place, so that in widening circles from Wimbledon mankind
loses the power to make and understand prepositional phrases. Now the virus
has gotten you, and to you prepositional phrases no longer make sense. You
can't read them, you can't write them, you can't utter them, and when you
hear them you can only ask ``Wha?'' Try it. Go read something, or
look out the window and describe what you see. Tell the story of your day.
Wait\ldots you can't exactly do that\ldots tell, instead, your day-story.
Recite how you went working\ldots how morning you went\ldots no\ldots morning
not you\ldots morning went\ldots how you morning went\ldots The rest will
be silence.

Only through unspeakable exertion and even ad hoc invention of new grammatical
arrangements can we get along at all without the prepositional phrase, as
trivial as that little thing seems to be. It's more than that. Should we
lose prepositional phrases, the loss of a certain arrangement of words would
be only the visible sign of a stupendous unseen disorder. We would in fact
have lost {\bfseries prepositionalism}, so to speak, the whole concept of the
kind of relationship that is signaled by the prepositional phrase. We'd
probably be totally incapacitated.

Try now to imagine the history of mankind without the prepositional phrase,
or, if you're tired of that, the relative clause or the distinction between
subject and object. It would be absurd to think that lacking those and other
such things the appearance and growth of human culture would have been merely
hindered. It would have been impossible. {\bfseries Everything}  that we have
done would have been simply impossible. The world out there is made of its
own stuff, but the world that we can understand and manipulate and predict
is made of discourse, and discourse is ruled by grammar. Without even so
elementary a device as the prepositional phrase we'd be wandering around
in herds right now, but we wouldn't know how to name what we were doing.

We're inclined to think of things like prepositional phrases as though they
were optional extras in a language, something like whitewall tires. This
is because we don't spend a lot of time dwelling on them except when we
study a language not our own. We study German, and here comes a lesson on
the prepositional phrase. Great, now we can {\bfseries add}  something to our
German. That's the metaphor in our heads; we think --- there is German,
it exists, and when you get good at it you can add on the fancy stuff like
prepositional phrases. All we have to do is memorize the prepositions and
remember which ones take the dative and which ones take the accusative and
which ones sometimes take the one and sometimes the other and when and why
and which ones are the exceptions. Suddenly it becomes depressing. How about
we forget the whole thing and settle for your stripped-down basic model
German without any of the fancy stuff? If you do that, of course, you'll
never find the {\bfseries Bahnhof}.  You'll be stymied in Stuttgart.

Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are
much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical
sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping the s from
our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and in most cases
context would be enough to indicate number. Even the distinction between
singular and plural verb forms is just as much a polite convention as an
essential element of meaning. But the structures, things like passives and
prepositional phrases, constitute, among other things, an implicit system
of moral philosophy, a view of the world {\bfseries and}  its presumed meanings,
and their misuse therefore often betrays an attitude or value that the user
might like to disavow.

There's an example from the works of a lady who may also have a worm in
her brain. She is ``the chair'' of the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission. It's very short and seems, to those willing to overlook a ``small''
grammatical flaw, almost too trivial to be worthy of comment. She writes:
``Instead of accepting charges indiscriminately and giving them docket
numbers, charging parties are counseled immediately.''

``Charging parties'' are probably faster than landing parties and
larger than raiding parties, but no matter. She means, probably, people
who are bringing charges of some sort, but there are many kinds of prose
in which people become parties. It's not really meant to sound convivial,
though: it's meant to sound ``legal.'' What's important is that
the structure of her sentence leads us to expect that the people (or parties)
named first after that comma will also be the people (or parties) responsible
for doing the ``accepting.'' We expect something like: ``Instead
of doing {\bfseries that}, we now do this.'' That's not because of some {\bfseries rule} ;
it's just the way English works. It both reflects and generates the way
the mind does its business in English. We, the readers, are disappointed
and confused because somebody who ought to have shown up in this sentence
has in fact not appeared. What has become of the {\bfseries accepting}  parties?
Are they hanging around the water cooler? Do they refuse to accept? Are
they at least hoping, that no one will remember that they are {\bfseries supposed} 
to accept? We can guess, of course, that they are the same people who make
up the counseling parties, who have also disappeared into a little passive.
It's as though we went charging down to the EEOC and found them all out
to lunch.

Well, that could have been a slip of the mind, the mind of the chair, of
course, but later we read: ``Instead of dealing with charging parties
and respondents through formalistic legal paper, the parties are called
together within a few weeks\ldots ''

It's the same arrangement. Who does that dealing, or, since that's what
they did before the ``instead,'' who {\bfseries did}  that dealing through
``formalistic'' paper? Wouldn't they be the same parties who ought
to do the calling together? Where have they all gone?

A schoolteacher would call those things examples of dangling modifiers and
provide some rules about them, but that's not important. What's important
is that those forms are evocations of that imagined world in which responsible
agency is hardly ever visible, much to the comfort of responsible agency.
Since that is the nature of the world already suggested by the passive voice,
you would expect that this writer, or chair, would be addicted to the passive.
You'd be right. Here are the bare skeletons of a few consecutive sentences:
\ldots staff is assigned\ldots \ldots cases are moved\ldots \ldots parties are contacted\ldots \ldots files are grouped\ldots and prioritized\ldots \ldots steps are delineated\ldots and time frames established\ldots \ldots discussions are encouraged\ldots 

You have to wonder how much of a discussion you could possibly have with
these people. They're never around.

Admittedly, it does these bureaucrats some credit that in their hearts they
are ashamed to say that they actually do those things that they do. After
all, who would want to tell the world that he, himself, in his very flesh,
goes around grouping and prioritizing?

The dangling modifiers go well with the passives, and, in suggesting the
nature of the world as seen by bureaucrats, they even add something new.
The passives are sort of neutral, verbal shoulder-shrugs --- these things
happen --- what can I tell you? The danglers go the next obvious and ominous
step and suggest subtly that those charging parties have caused a heap of
trouble and really ought to be handed the job of sorting things out for
themselves, which, grammatically, is exactly what happens. In the first
example the people who do the accepting and the counseling ought to appear
right after the comma, but they don't. In the second, the people who do
the dealing and the calling ought to appear right after the comma, but they
don't. In both cases the people who {\bfseries do}  appear are the clients on
whose behalf someone is supposed to accept, counsel, deal, and call. Does
that mean something about the way in which those clients are regarded by
this agency? They seem to have been put in some kind of grammatical double
jeopardy, which is probably unconstitutional.

The poor lady, or chair, has inadvertently said what she probably meant.
Working for the government would be so pleasant if it weren't for those
pesky citizens. A waspish psychiatrist might observe that she has taken
those charging parties and has ``put them in their place'' with
a twist of grammar, thus unconsciously expressing her wish that they ought
to be responsible for all the tedious labor their charges will cost her
and her friends. She herself, along with the whole blooming EEOC, has withdrawn
behind a curtain of cloudy English from the clash of charging parties on
the darkling plain. ``Ach so, sehr interessant, nicht wahr, zat ze patzient
ist immer py ze Wort 'inshtead' gonvused. Es gibt, vielleicht, a broplem
of, how you zay, Inshteadness.'' And indeed, the result of the dangling
modifiers is to put the charging parties forth {\bfseries instead}  of someone
else, as though the word had been chosen to stand out in front of the sentence
as a symbol of the latent meaning.

Surely this lady, or chair, is an educated person, or chair, perfectly able
to see and fix dangling modifiers of the sort they used to deal with in
the early grades. After all, she has been hired as a chair, and for such
a position we can assume some pretty high standards and stringent requirements.
All right, so she doesn't know the difference between ``formal''
and ``formalistic'' --- big deal. When such a high-ranking official
of our government apparatus makes a mistake in structure, and habitually
at that, it's not much to the point to underline it and put an exclamation
mark in the margin. In a small child these would be mistakes; in a chair
they are accidental revelations of a condition in the mind. To put the name
of the thing modified as close as possible to the modifier is not a ``rule''
of English; it is a sign of something the mind does in English. When the
English doesn't do that thing, it's because the mind hasn't done it.

It would be fatuous for us to say that we don't understand those sentences
because of the disappearance of the people who are supposed to do all those
things. It is a schoolteacher's cheap trick to say that if you don't get
your grammar right people won't understand you. It's almost impossible to
mangle grammar to that point where you won't be understood. We understand
those sentences. In fact, we understand them better than the writer; we
understand both what she thought she was saying and something else that
she didn't think she was saying.

Many readers, of course, would ``understand'' those sentences without
even thinking of the problem they present, and they might think these comments
pedantic and contentious. Oh, come on, what's all the fuss? A couple of
little mistakes. What does it matter? We all know what she means, don't
we?

Such objections come from the erroneous idea that the point of language
is merely to communicate, ``to act your ideas across,'' whatever
that means. Furthermore, such objectors may think that they are defending
a hardworking and well-meaning chair, but she is little likely to be grateful
for their partisanship if she figures out what it means. They say, in effect,
that her little mistakes are just that, little mistakes rather than inadvertent
and revealing slips of the mind. In the latter case, however, we can conclude
that she is merely a typical bureaucrat with an appropriately managerial
twist in the brain; in the former we would simply have to conclude that
she is not well enough educated to be allowed to write public documents.
Which of these conclusions do you suppose she would prefer? It seems that
we must choose one or the other. Those are either mistakes made in ignorance
or mistakes made in something other than ignorance.

The mind, thinking in English, does indubitably push modifiers and things
modified as close together as possible. Can there really be a place in the
brain where that happens, a function that might be damaged or dulled? It
doesn't matter, of course, because there is surely a ``place'' in
the mind analogous to the imagined place in the brain.

Whether by worms or world-views, it does seem sometimes to be invaded and
eaten away. The malfunctions we can see in this chair and in my erstwhile
friend, now an assistant dean pro tem, are small inklings of a whole galaxy
of disorders that has coalesced out of the complicated history of language,
of our language in particular, and out of the political history of language
in general.




\chapter{The Two Tribes}



The Jiukiukwe Indians live in some swamps near the headwaters of the
Orinoco. They are the most primitive people on the face of the earth, and
their homeland is so isolated and dismal and totally lacking in anything
of value that they will never be discovered by civilized men.

They do not know the use of fire. They wear no clothing, although on special
occasions the married men do drape pieces of vines around their necks. They
don't tie them, however, for they have not discovered the knot. They build
no shelters, and they use no tools, except for unworked rocks with which
they bang on trees in order to dislodge the bark and expose the grubs and
worms on which they live. Once in a while they find a dead fish floating
in the water close enough to the shore to be hauled in without having to
wade out too far. The waters teem with nasty creatures. They celebrate the
occasion with a communal meal and a religious festival, at the climax of
which the married men drape the pieces of vine around their necks. When
the party is over, they squat happily in the muck and jabber away at each
other in a language that contains thirty-four separate noun declensions,
each providing forty-five separate forms, fifteen singulars, fifteen duals,
and fifteen plurals.

Their verbs are even more complicated. The conjugations, eleven in all,
indicate not only the usual things like person, number, tense, voice, and
mood, but also the relationship of the speaker to his listener. A younger
brother who is nevertheless not the youngest of his mother's sons and who
has never found a fish must speak, in the dry season, to the eldest of his
paternal uncles in verb forms that would scandalize the mother-in-law of
his youngest female cousin, especially in the rainy season.

The Jiukiukwe language has an enormous vocabulary in matters of interest
to the Jiukiukwe. Although their technology is limited to the banging of
trees with stones, they have scores of words to describe it. They have separate
and unrelated words for flat stones, round stones, big stones, little stones,
sharp stones, and so on, but they have no word for ``stone.'' In
the case of trees, the vocabulary is even larger, since trees in which grubs
or worms have been found are distinguished individually from one another
by words that amount almost to ``names'' and are devised as needed,
while unproductive trees or trees not yet banged are named not for any physical
attributes but for their location with reference to the nearest tree that
has provided grubs and worms. The whole system is duplicated with utterly
unrelated words for fallen trees. They have, however, no word that simply
means ``tree.''

Since they use their knuckles and fingertips for counting, they can count
only up to thirty-eight. (They count three knuckles on each finger but only
two on the thumb.) Counting begins with the knuckle at the base of the left
little finger, moves out to the tip, continues starting with the knuckle
at the base of the ring finger, and so forth. Each hand thus provides nineteen
units. Every knuckle and every fingertip has its own name, and those names
are also the names of the numbers. They have, however, no names for the
toes, and, while they do speak of the arms and the legs, they use one and
the same word to name the ankles, knees, wrists, and elbows.

``Correct'' social behavior among the Jiukiukwe is entirely a matter
of doing and saying the right thing to the right relative under the right
circumstances. Accordingly, the vocabulary and grammar of kinship are very
large and complex. They have separate words for every possible degree of
familial relationship. Not only, for instance, is there a special word for
the oldest son of your mother's next youngest sister, but there is yet another
word for him should he have reached that estate through the death of some
older brother. In either case, he is called by still another name until
sunset on a day when he has found a dead fish. However, since all the Jiukiukwe
are related to one another in some precisely nameable way, they have no
need for words that mean things like ``family'' or ``relative''
or ``kinship.''

There is a curious thing about the way they use their verbs. They have,
of course, both passive and active forms, but they consider it a serious
breach of etiquette amounting almost to sacrilege to use the active form
when speaking of persons. In a child, the use of the active voice in the
first person singular is taken somewhat less seriously, but it is still
discouraged as a mark of arrogance or aggressiveness. Indeed, their words
for ``angry'' and ``insane'' both contain an element of
the ending that goes with the first person singular in that conjugation
most often used by young children. They do not say: ``I am eating my
worm.'' They say rather: ``With regard to the worm unto me, there
is an occasion of eating.'' Animals and objects, however, are normally
found as subjects of active verbs. The sun rises and the worm crawls, subject
only to those forms available to that person who is saying those things
and to whom he says them.

Their language sounds terribly complicated, and it is. It is every bit as
complicated as English, or any other language, for that matter. All languages
are complicated beyond hope of complete description. When it seems to us
that German is less difficult to learn than Arabic, what we have noticed
is not that German is less complicated than Arabic but that German is the
more like English. Speaking his language is the most complicated thing a
human being does, and should he undertake to go even further and learn to
read and write it, he multiplies one infinitude of complications by another.
It is an awesome marvel that anyone can do any of these things, never mind
do them well.

Nevertheless, billions of people speak and understand a language. In fact,
unless there's something wrong, every human being there is speaks and understands
at least one language. Every member of {\bfseries Homo sapiens}  ever born spoke
and understood a language, unless, of course, he died too soon or was in
some special way disabled. The ability to use language is included in the
meaning of {\bfseries sapiens}.  We have no other way of being{\bfseries  sapiens}  except
through language. The Jiukiukwe may lack barbecue pits and some of our other
things, but they are every bit as {\bfseries sapiens}  as the inhabitants of Manhasset.
They have all it takes.

Still, they are different from the inhabitants of Manhasset in many ways.
The material differences come easily to mind, since the Manhassetites have
not only barbecue pits but much more, but there is a much more important
difference than that. It is this: In the same circumstance, the Manhassetite
will say, ``I want food'' and the Jiukiukwe will say, ``As for
me, there is hunger.'' Every other difference is because of this difference;
this is {\bfseries the}  difference between the Manhassetites and the Jiukiukwe,
the difference from which all smaller differences flow.

The Manhassetites speak a language in which the typical statement takes
the form of a sentence that names a doer and his deed. The most common elaboration
also names the ``object'' of his deed. ``I want food'' displays
exactly the typical structure of the most ordinary Manhassetite utterance.
The structure may be modified and elaborated in many ways, some of them
quite extensive and complicated, but it remains the enduring skeleton of
the typical statement: A doer does something, often to something or someone.
The continuous reappearance of this structure has taught all Manhassetites
a particular view of the world and man's place in it. They understand the
world as a place where doers do things. That is why many of them will get
raises next year and dig bigger barbecue pits. 

The Jiukiukwe, on the other hand, have been taught by the basic structure
of their language that {\bfseries doing}  is properly the business of the things
in the world around them. Nor do they think of themselves, again because
of their grammar, as the ``objects'' of the things that are done
in the world. For the Jiukiukwe, the inanimate or animal doers of deeds
do them at most ``insofar as he is concerned,'' as though he were,
if not always an unaffected bystander, at least no more than accidentally
related to what happens in the world. The Jiukiukwe are just {\bfseries there} ;
the world does its things around them, sometimes ``in their case.''

They will not get any raises next year, and you can easily see why they
have no barbecue pits to enlarge. Technological change comes about when
somebody does things to something. The Jiukiukwe have always lived, and
will always live, exactly as they do today. Their technology will not change
unless the basic structure of their language changes, although it may also
be possible that the basic structure of their language would change should
their technology change. There's no way of knowing which must come first,
if either, but it seems more likely that the language must change before
the technology unless some imported technology should come along and eventually
force a change in the language.

Imagine that some particularly eccentric or mildly demented Jiukiukwe should
develop the rude habit of speaking in the active and saying things like
``I will find worms.'' He has now announced, to the Jiukiukwe way
of thinking, some purported fact about the world and has at the same time
subjected himself to considerable social disapproval. If he's to get back
into the good graces of his older sister's father-in-law, and of everybody
else, he had damn well better come up with the worms. The more the better.
Then his arrogant statement might be re-understood and perhaps accepted
indeed as a statement of fact about the world. In desperation, he might
well discover that you can find more worms by prying off the bark with a
sharp-edged stone than by banging the tree till the bark falls off. It might
occur to him that some sharp stones are easier to hold and manipulate than
others. Remember, he's going to work hard; they're all waiting for him to
find worms and thus justify a statement in which he spoke of himself as
one might speak of the sun or the moon. That's serious. It won't be long
before he finds an obviously broken stone that works very well, and then
it will come to him that he might bang some of those less efficient round
stones together until{\bfseries  they}  break and turn into good worm-diggers.
Out of the active voice, a technology will be born. Before long, his relatives,
noticing how plump and healthy he looks, will learn to copy both his magics,
his verbs as well as his stones, and that will be the end of civilization
as the Jiukiukwe know it.

When a Manhassetite faces a problem, he asks, drawing upon the basic structure
of his language, ``What shall I do?'' He looks for an action to
perform. The Jiukiukwe is unlikely even to think that he faces a problem,
since that itself is a case of an agent doing something to something. Significantly,
the Jiukiukwe language has no word for ``problem.'' ``Problem''
can be thought of only in a language that can also think of ``solution,''
and the relationship between the two is understood through a grammar that
permits the idea of doers doing things. The Jiukiukwe do not think of a
shortage of worms as a ``problem,'' a condition whose very name
suggests that somebody might do something about something. They think of
it as a ``badness,'' ``a state of few worms in relation to us,''
a condition in the world that just happens to affect them.

Although the Jiukiukwe seem to pay a heavy price for their grammar, they
also take from it some advantages not available to the Manhassetites. They
have, for instance, no warfare, because warfare not only arises from the
willed deeds of agents but is itself a matter of willing agents doing things
to each other. In any case, they don't even have the individual analogues
of war: hatred, envy, and competitiveness. The Manhassetites are a small
subgroup of a large, warlike tribe, which is, in turn, only one of many
tribes loosely associated into an enormous culture in which warfare is a
permanent institution and even the root of much of its most vigorous enterprise.
Naturally, hatred, envy, and competition are almost universal among individual
Manhassetites. For the Jiukiukwe there is essentially only one doer of things,
and that is something like the world itself, which does what it does neither
out of will nor out of design. It has no intentions; it just happens. For
the Manhassetites, there are as many possible doers as there are members
of the species or nouns in the language, and their grammar encourages them
to envision a universe in which conflict of intentions is simply a part
of the fabric of reality.

An idea of reality is what we devise and perceive through our language;
reality itself is probably something else again. Both the Jiukiukwe and
the Manhassetites fancy that they know the real world, but what they know
is some presumed order of things symbolized and suggested by the vocabularies
and structures of their languages. They live by grammar, all men do. That's
why the grammars of all languages are so terribly complicated. There are
no people, however ``primitive,'' who see the world as a simple
place. In fact, the more ``primitive'' they are, the more complicated
and elaborate the assumed underlying structure of reality in their languages.
Furthermore, there seem to be no people who are content to have a language
in which to consider only the world of sensible experience, and all languages
are anchored mostly in other worlds rather than the one that we experience
here and now.

It's fun, and safe, to speculate on the origins of language. What makes
it fun is obvious, but what makes it safe is that no dreary scholar will
ever come along with the facts to prove what a fool you've been. If you
speculate on Milton's toilet-training or the social structures of the leaf-cutting
ants, the very next mail will bring you a fat journal containing the definitive
findings. The mystery of the origin of language is the linguist's equivalent
of the physicist's mystery of the nature of the universe, if any, before
the big bang. The evidence we need is utterly inaccessible, and there's
no way to draw valid conclusions from the evidence we have. Even experimentation
is impossible. The story has been told, for instance, of several famous
despots, that they had some newborn children raised from infancy by deaf-mute
nursemaids to see what language they would speak. It turned out that children
thus raised do not, after all, grow up speaking Hebrew, the supposed language
of God and the angels. They grow up, of course, speaking nothing. Learning
your language seems not at all analogous to developing one. Such an experiment
would tell us nothing about the origin of language even if we could keep
it going for thousands of years and watch generation after generation. The
brains and even the vocal apparatus of those in whom language began were
significantly different from ours, and our isolated infants would begin
with an {\bfseries evolved}  propensity for language. It would surely be an interesting
experiment, but it would tell us nothing about {\bfseries the}  origin of language.

It is just as much fun, however, and somewhat more useful to speculate about
something that was probably not the origin of language, although we sometimes
carelessly think that it might have been. There is a kind of everyday, commonsense
notion about the origin of language that sticks in our heads and causes
important misunderstandings. It is, of course, the notion that language
must have begun as a way of naming things in the world in which we live.
Those are exactly the things that need no naming.

The world in which we live is very tiny; it is as tiny for the Manhassetites
as it is for the Jiukiukwe. That world can only be the world of immediate
sensory experience, the world we can perceive in whatever way we can in
this moment, which is now gone. The world of sensory experience is so tiny
and so brief that, in a sense, we can't do anything in it; we can only {\bfseries be} 
in it. The world that was before this moment is immeasurably big, and so
too the world that will be, to say nothing of the world that might have
been or the world that may yet be or, the root of morality, the world that
someone thinks {\bfseries should}  be. It is the main business of language to
evoke such worlds.

The speechless animals live entirely in the world that is. It is sometimes
said that some of the animals have a ``language'' with which they
send signals to one another about the world that is. That's nonsense. That
we can uncritically accept such nonsense is testimony to the power of grammar.
``Animals send signals'' is a satisfying appearance of the basic
structure of our language, and it harmonizes sweetly with our concomitant
idea that the world is a place where most of what happens can be understood
as the act of an agent who is doing something. The animals are not agents
committing acts. When a zebra out on the edge of the herd sniffs a lion
in the tall grass, he does not say to himself in any fashion, ``I had
better tell the others.'' (Nor would you, for that matter.) He simply
does what is appropriate for a successful zebra to do under those circumstances.
His startled neighbors, startled by what he does whether they sniff lion
or not, do likewise. That's part of how they got to be grown-up zebras in
the first place. The zebras who are slow to startle have a way of dropping
out of the herd early in life. In a moment, the whole herd is in flight,
but it cannot be properly said that a zebra has sent a message. It would
be more accurate to say that the zebras have caught something from one another.

Human beings, too, catch things from one another, and usually with no use
of language at all. We can imagine the hominid and speechless precursors
of man wandering not far from the zebras. What need could they possibly
have had to call the lion by a name? Just as surely as the zebras, they
must have reacted appropriately to a whiff of lion. If they hadn't, they
wouldn't have been around long enough to provide a future for all of us.
What need, for that matter, would they have had to name the food they were
eating or seeking, the food of the world of experience? Would they have
had to be ``told'' to feed the young? To sleep at night? No animals
need names for such things, because they do not have to ``tell''
of them. Such things, in their seasons, are just{\bfseries  there}.  Language
is for telling, not for naming. Nobody needs to be told that he is getting
wet in the rain or that he is eating a banana.

Think what happens when you encounter an unexpected snake, the usual kind.
There is no word in your head, no language at all, in the instant of automatic
recoil. {\bfseries Then}  you say, if only in your head; ``Oh, a snake.''
The word ``snake'' makes you feel better, because it opens the gates
for many other words. It occurs to you, because you have the words {\bfseries in
which}  it occurs to you, that most snakes found in Manhasset are harmless
and unaggressive and that you're not really in danger. You have transformed
a creature in the world of sense experience into a whole system of related
ideas in a world that is not the world of sense experience. That little
chill was real, and, for a moment, it remains, but you are not in flight.
You are in another world, the world where snakes are made of discourse,
not blood and bones and teeth. Your language gives you access to that world.

The Jiukiukwe are also afraid of snakes, and they have better reasons than
we. The swamps are full of them, and none of them is harmless. Members of
the tribe sometimes die of snakebite, and little children out looking for
dead fish have occasionally been swallowed by anacondas. In the company
of an anaconda, any forest animal is afraid, just like any Jiukiukwe. The
difference, though, is that the Jiukiukwe have a language so that they don't
have to wait to be afraid until they actually find themselves in the company
of the anaconda. They can be afraid ahead of time. In language they remember
the anaconda of the past and take thought for the anaconda of the future.
{\bfseries Those}  big snakes are not around to inspire fear; they are in other
worlds. Language evokes them.

The Jiukiukwe use a part of the word for anaconda to describe those places
where the snakes have been seen in the past. With the appropriate verb ending,
of course, the same word is used to shoo children away from things. This
is actually a form of technology, or, at least, social engineering, since
it makes the children anxious and more than ordinarily observant when they
are in places that carry that name. In spite of the obvious fact that there
aren't {\bfseries always}  anacondas to be found in those places, the language
behaves as though there were. Some world other than the world of experience
is projected by the use of an adjective. When we can project such an alternative
world, we can also find, sometimes, a way of bringing it home and thus changing
the world of immediate experience.

In language, man can project a world in which he doesn't get soaked by every
rain that falls. In that language, he can also reconstruct some past world
in which he found himself under an overhanging cliff that kept him out of
the rain. He can start looking for cliffs. He can eventually project a world
in which some artificial cliff keeps him out of the rain and provides him
with a quiet, comfortable afternoon in which to refine the invention of
architecture. Such projections require language, not merely the naming of
things.

People who have merely come up with a word for ``wet'' can do nothing
more than stand around in the rain announcing to each other a sorry fact
that needs no announcing. It won't help them, either, to come up with a
word for ``dry.'' What they need is a way to think about ``dry''
even while they are getting wet, a way to relate the two even when only
one is present in the world of experience. They need ``wet could be
dry.'' That's grammar.

A collection of names for things in the world, however large, does not make
a language. A language is only incidentally in the business of naming things.
Its important business is to explore the way in which things are, or perhaps
might be, related to one another. Building a shelter takes more than words
for ``dry'' and ``cliff.'' It needs an idea of relationship,
the idea of ``under.'' Then it needs another relationship, one that
might be understood by something like ``dry under {\bfseries made}  cliff.''
To that, some designing mind must add not only ``tomorrow'' but
``all tomorrows.'' ``Cliff'' names something in the palpable
world, and ``dry'' names not exactly a thing in the world but at
least a physical condition. Those other words, however, ``made''
and ``tomorrow'' and ``all,'' name nothing in this world.
They name some ways in which things can be related to each other.

How such words came to be is a profound mystery, every bit as vexatious
as the mystery surrounding the birth of language itself. Perhaps, even probably,
they are the same mystery, for there certainly could be no such thing as
language without them. The ability to discern and name the relationships
suggested, for instance, by words like ``so'' and ``if''
was more important to the history of man than fire or the wheel, neither
of which would have been ours without ``so'' and ``if.''

Even many of the words that we think of as the names of things in the world
are really descriptions of relationships that exist only in the world of
language. The Jiukiukwe, remember, have no word for ``stone,'' since
for them stones as stones have no interest. To them, what we would call
a pile of stones is a pile of treebangers, a name not intended to point
at the things themselves but to their place in the life of the Jiukiukwe.
To some other crowd of savages the same pile of stones might well be a pile
of ``weapons.'' Stones are indeed found lying around on the ground,
but weapons and treebangers are found in systems of culture.

Similarly, when the Jiukiukwe have a word for every possible family relationship,
it's not because they are naming precisely this or that person who actually
exists before their very eyes. They are naming {\bfseries places}  in a complicated
social design, not people. The social system exists in their minds, but
it can exist there only because the language sets it forth for the mind
to understand. They would say that {\bfseries we}  are primitive in our appreciation
of family life because we can name so few relationships, just as we say
that they are primitive because they use the same word for ``knee''
and ``elbow.'' From their point of view, we are just that backward
because we call all the sons of our mothers by the one word ``brother.''

People who can remember only one line of Wittgenstein are likely to remember
his terse suggestion that we ought to keep our mouths shut about matters
whereof we can tell nothing. This dictum provides some interesting corollaries.
One of them is that in matters where we {\bfseries do}  keep our mouths shut,
we can have no knowledge. If, for instance, there should exist something
that a language has no way of expressing, then that thing does not ``exist''
for the culture that speaks the language. For all their compulsive attention
to their relatives, the Jiukiukwe, as you know, have no word for ``family.''
They are all related. Since we are not, we need the word ``family''
as a term of distinction. In like fashion, every word isolates the thing
named from everything else that there is, whether it be the name of some
object in the world of experience or some idea of relationship in the world
of language. In effect, everything that gets a name gets it because we can
perceive that everything else is {\bfseries not}  that thing. Even the simple
abstraction ``stones,'' therefore, is for us just as much a recognition
of a relationship as ``treebangers'' is for the Jiukiukwe. The relationship
of ``stones'' to everything that is not ``stones'' we can
perceive. Of those relationships that we do not, for one reason or another,
perceive, we cannot speak, and thus we can have no knowledge.

Our knowledge is made up of the stories that we can tell, stories that must
be told in the language that we know. (Even mathematics is a ``language''
that states propositions and tells stories. It's a very elaborate form of
``play'' language. That's why it's such fun for those who speak
it well.) Where we can tell no story, we can have no knowledge. That's probably
why we all have amnesia about infancy. As infants, we hadn't the language
with which to transform the world of experience into the more durable form
of knowledge and memory. When our forebears had no language and no knowledge,
the best they could do was sniff the lion in the long grass. That wasn't
too bad, of course, and thousands of other kinds of creatures have done
quite well with nothing more. But when we found language and became {\bfseries Homo
sapiens}  (how could those events have been anything other than simultaneous?),
we could tell ourselves the story of the last time we passed this way and
lost Gbloog to a lion. Even more important, we could invent the story of
the next time and either be prepared for a lion or decide to take the long
way around. To deal with the lion here and now, we don't need language,
just a good nose and strong legs. Language can deal with the lion that was
and the lion that will be, even the lion that {\bfseries may}  be. Creatures who
can speak can survive even if they have bad noses and short, stumpy legs.

In those times, linguistic ability must have brought an even better hope
of survival than physical prowess. The silly boob who just couldn't get
into his head the implications of the future conditional, accordingly, was
just a hair more likely to be eaten by lions than his lame but more intellectual
brother. A new element had appeared in the process of natural selection.
Nowadays, we notice that there is very little danger of being eaten by lions.
Nevertheless, the destiny that waits in the long grass for the silly boob
who can't get his language straight is not a good one, although, of course,
it does last longer than the business of being eaten by a lion. It's more
like being eaten by a worm, slowly.




\chapter{A Bunch of Marks}




Still, skill in language does provide a better hope of survival; it even
wins wars, for struggle on the field of battle is a dramatic version of
strife in the minds of men. Long before the first trigger was pulled, Hitler
fired off a shattering salvo of words. He pounded his fist and shouted:
{\itshape ``Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein F{\"{u}}hrer!''} Don't make the
mistake of thinking that his listeners muttered back an uncertain {\itshape ``Ach
so, gewiss, gewiss.''} They shouted back, {\itshape ``Ein Volk, ein
Reich, ein F{\"{u}}hrer!''}

The cannonade roared across the Channel and shook the cliffs of England.
Fortunately for us all, England, although unarmed, was not unready. The
answering barrage rings in our ears still: ``Blood, toil, tears, and
sweat.'' Battle was joined. Hitler's words sent the Wehrmacht crashing
to the outskirts of Dunkirk but Churchill's words sent schoolboys and accountants
and retired fishmongers down to the sea in their little boats and over the
water to the beaches of Dunkirk.

While that may be an incomplete account of the war, it is not an inaccurate
one. It was a war of words and speaking just as much as a war of iron and
blood. If the fighting was sometimes noble and brave, it was because certain
words were in the minds of men. If the fighting was sometimes stupid and
vicious, it was because certain other words were in the minds of men. Whatever
else Churchill may have been doing in those days, he was always providing
the English with words. With words he formed their thoughts and emotions.
``We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills,''
said Churchill. Millions answered, apparently, ``By God, so we shall.''

Imagine, however, that Churchill had been an ordinary bureaucrat and had
chosen to say instead:

``Consolidated defensive positions and essential preplanned withdrawal
facilities are to be provided in order to facilitate maximum potentialization
for the repulsion and/or delay of incursive combatants in each of several
preidentified categories of location deemed suitable to the emplacement
and/or debarkation of hostile military contingents.''

That would, at least, have spared us the pain of wondering what to do about
the growing multitudes who can't seem to read and write English. By now
we'd be wondering what to do about the growing multitudes who can't seem
to read and write German.

Speech is tremendously powerful. It moves our minds and makes the path of
history. It is, furthermore, perhaps the most complicated skill we have,
and the uttering of words and sentences is only its beginning. When we speak,
we do many other things simultaneously. We turn our heads and lift our eyebrows
and wiggle our fingers and get up and walk about. We find exactly the right
place from which to say {\bfseries this}  thing, and we go over to lean on the
mantelpiece to say some other thing. We choose the appropriate pitch and
volume for every sound. We sprinkle our speech with nonverbal sound effects,
snorts and mm's, sighs and tsk's, and especially pauses, which are as important
to speech as the rests to music. We change the shapes of our mouths and
throats and alter the very tone quality of our voices. All such things,
and innumerably more, we do quite automatically, and with such devices we
suggest immeasurably more than the words can say by themselves.

Writing, on the other hand, is just a bunch of marks. It is {\bfseries not}  speech
written down, and it lacks almost all the expressive devices of speech.
It simply isn't ``natural'' in the way that speech is natural. For
the natural expressive devices of speech, writing provides only a few pathetically
inadequate gimmicks. We have some marks of punctuation and some graphic
tricks, like capital letters and underlining. We can find an occasional
word or expression that may remind a reader of the sound of speech, you
know, and drop it in here and there. An occasional genius learns to write
dialogue that we can almost hear and even to devise long passages that{\bfseries 
sound}  exactly right, but in general writing is even further from speech
than notation is from music.

Like music, speech has a tune, and we have only the meagerest ways of indicating
on the page the tune to which our words are to be sung. Commas, for instance,
are pretty good as indicators of tune, and so are periods. They usually
call for bits of melody that every native speaker of English sings in pretty
much the same way. Question marks, however, indicate only a certain ``family''
of tunes, for any question we can make in English can be sung in many different
ways to convey many different meanings. All these gimmicks, nevertheless,
even the quotation marks that suggested a certain way to sing ``family''
in the last sentence, can't come close to a realistic approximation of the
tune of English. And even if they could, they still wouldn't tell you which
word was to be said slowly and deep in the throat and what sentence was
to be delivered while leaning on the mantelpiece. As a way of recording
speech, writing is a dismal failure.

It doesn't matter, though, because the recording of speech is not the proper
business of writing. The proper business of writing is to stay put on the
page so that we can look at it later. Writing, whether it be a grocery list
or {\itshape The Brothers Karamazov},  freezes the work of the mind into a permanent
and public form. It is the mind and memory of mankind in such a form that
we can pass it around to one another and even hand it on to our unimaginably
remote descendants.

Language is, essentially, speech. Writing is a special case of language.
Discursive prose is a special case of writing. Written, discursive prose
may be almost three thousand years old, but it is still our most recently
invented use of language. It is no coincidence that the Greeks who first
devised discursive prose also constructed formal logic and were the first
to provide for {\bfseries their}  unimaginably remote descendants a visible record
of the works of their minds. Thinking {\bfseries is}  coherent discourse, and
the logic and the prose require one another.

The mind is a rudderless wanderer blown here or there by any puff of breeze.
If I mention watermelons, you must think of watermelons; if giraffes, giraffes.
The very rare genius can keep his mind on course for a while, perhaps as
long as a whole minute, but most of us are always at the mercy of every
random suggestion of environment. We imagine that we sit down and think,
but, in fact, we mostly gather wool, remembering this and that and fantasizing
about the other. In our heads we recite some slogans and rehash the past,
often repeatedly. Even in this foolish maundering, we are easily distracted
by random thoughts, mostly about money or politics but often about sports
or sex. Left to its own devices, the mind plays like a child in well-stocked
sandbox, toying idly with trinkets and baubles and often doing the same
thing over and over again until some slightly more interesting game presents
itself.

If we want to pursue extended logical thought, thought that can discover
relationships and consequences and devise its own alternatives, we need
a discipline imposed from outside of the mind itself. Writing is that discipline.
It seems drastic, but we have to suspect that coherent, continuous thought
is impossible for those who cannot construct coherent, continuous prose.

``Writing,'' Bacon said, ``Maketh the exact man,'' as we
all know, but we ordinarily stop thinking about that too soon. The ``exact''
part is only half of what writing makes; the other half is the ``man.''
Writing does indeed make us exact because it leaves a trail of thought that
we can retrace and so discover where we have been stupid. At the same time,
though, it makes us ``men,'' grown-ups who can choose what toys
we want to play with and who can outwit the random suggestions of environment.
In his writing, then, we can judge of at least two things in a man -- his
ability to think and his intention to do so, his maturity. An education
that does not teach clear, coherent writing cannot provide our world with
thoughtful adults; it gives us instead, at the best, clever children of
all ages.

To understand the importance of writing for people who want to have a civilization,
it is useful to compare discursive prose with poetry. Poetry is much older
than prose, but since we have been taught to think it a form of ``art,''
we regularly assume that prose comes first and that poetry, a much trickier
business, is ``refined'' out of it with pain and skill. Not so.
Many of the qualities that make poetry what it is are far more ``natural''
to any speaker of a language than the devices of prose. Like speech, poetry
is metaphorical and figurative, elliptical, often more expressive than informative,
synthetic rather than analytic, and concrete rather than abstract. Speech
may not often be {\bfseries good}  poetry, whatever that may be, but sometimes
it {\bfseries is}.  Little children devise poetic expressions quite naturally,
and there seems to be no culture, however ``primitive'' we may think
it, without its traditional poetry. Even the wretched Jiukiukwe have poetry.

The Jiukiukwe, like all other human beings, have some practical uses for
poetry. In little verses, they can remember without effort the signs of
a coming storm and the looks of the worms that cause diarrhea, just as we
remember how many days there are in April. In poetry, or in language that
is like poetry, they perform the social rituals that hold them together.
That's exactly what we do when we recite the traditional formulae of recognition:
Good to see you; What's new?; Lovely weather we're having. All such forms
are permissible variations within the limits of established rituals that
we all perform just because we're here and we're all in this together. We
can remember and recite those ritual greetings just as easily as we can
sing Fa-la-la-la-la and come in on the chorus -- all together now!

(Digression: Why do we devote so much idle talk to the weather? Everybody
knows, of course, that the weather is a ``safe'' subject, but that
doesn't answer the question. It provides two new questions: {\bfseries Why}  is
the weather a safe subject? and, Why do we devote so much idle talk to safe
subjects?

The weather is right{\bfseries  there}  in the world of experience. Even assistant
deans pro tem can see that it's raining. When I meet the assistant dean
pro tem on the campus in the rain, I am likely to assert, in one way or
another, that it is in fact raining. He is likely to confirm this observation,
after his fashion. We have used language where no language is needed, to
indicate what {\bfseries is}  in the world of experience. To point out the rain
to each other seems about as useful as mentioning the fact that we are both
walking on our hind legs. That may be exactly why it's useful. We have taken
the trouble to name something that needs no naming, thus acknowledging our
kinship while still being careful not to evoke some other world in which
our kinship might be questionable. Should I greet the assistant dean pro
tem by announcing that power corrupts, he may well reply, ``Absolutely!''
and we will have evoked some other world, a world we'd rather not explore
just now with the rain dripping down the backs of our necks. Twain probably
had the truth in mind when he said that everyone talks about the weather
but that nobody{\bfseries  does}  anything about it. In fact, we talk about it
precisely{\bfseries  because}  we can't do anything about it. It permits us to
establish our membership, which is polite, but it doesn't require that we
look at each other's credentials too closely, which might be rude.)

Poetry is a profoundly conservative use of language. It conserves not only
values and ideas but the very language itself, so that even some grammatical
forms that ought to have disappeared long ago are still around and useful
for special effects. Even crackpots who want to simplify and modernize English
cannot bring themselves to say: Thirty days has September. It's amazing,
but that actually {\bfseries sounds wrong}, almost as wrong as: Six days shall
you labor.

Prose is progressive and disruptive. It must subvert or elude the poetic
qualities of speech to go about the business of logic and analysis. Discursive
prose is essentially antisocial, subject to constraints and regulations
that would be unsuitable, perhaps even rude, in speech. Writing is an audacious
and insolent act. When we write, we call the other members of our tribe
to order. We command their attention. We assert that what we have to say
is valuable enough that they should give over their idle chitchat about
the weather. It had better be.

When we choose to address our friends and relatives in discursive prose,
it must be because what we want to say requires the special powers of discursive
prose: logic, order, and coherence. The mere appearance of discursive prose
promises those things. When I meet the assistant dean pro tem in the rain,
I send and expect signals of fellowship. When I read his latest guidelines
for the work of the Committee on Memorial Plaques, I hold in my hands a
promise of logic, order, and coherence, and equally a promise that the language
I read will be constrained and regulated in such a way as to engender those
things. There is no Rule in Heaven that language has to be logical, orderly,
and coherent any more than there is some Law of Nature that requires football
players to stay within the lines. You can grab a football and run to Oshkosh
anytime you please; you just won't be playing football. Your language can
be illogical, disorderly, and even incomprehensible -- in fact, sometimes
it {\bfseries should}  be so -- but you won't be writing discursive prose.

Ordinary speech, like poetry, is a kind of art; discursive prose in particular,
like writing in general, is a technology. Clear, concise writing is a result
of good technique, like an engine that starts and runs.

Good technique requires the knowledge and control of many conventional forms
and devices. They must be conventional because writing is public and enduring,
and the path of its thought must be visible to other minds in other times.
Like the conventional ``rules'' of any technology, the rules of
writing have come to be what they are because they work. You do well to
keep the subject of your sentence clearly in view just as you do well to
keep your powder dry and your eye on the ball. These things work.

Furthermore, although such things are matters of technique, they are derived
not from some concern for technique but because they go to the heart of{\bfseries 
the}  matter. You keep your eye on the ball because it is the ball, and
the meaning of the game is known only because of what happens to the ball.
You get no points for cute panties. You keep your eye on the subject because
it is the subject, and not just grammatically. It is the subject of thought,
and the sentence is a proposition about it. We do not think by naming things
but by making propositions about them. Nor do we think by making propositions
about unnamed or unnameable things. Any writer forgets that from time to
time, but a learned rule of technology calls him to order. The rules of
the technology of discursive prose are simply aids to thought, and to learn
the conventions of writing without learning the habit of thought is impossible.

Fools and scoundrels say that the time of writing is past, that Direct Distance
Dialing and the cassette recorder have done to writing what the internal
combustion engine did to the art of equitation. They point out, quite correctly
by the way, that the ordinary American, once released from the schools,
can go through all the rest of his life without ever having to devise a
complete sentence. Even the thousands of forms we have to fill out call
only for filling in blanks or checking boxes. This freedom from writing,
in fact, doesn't always have to wait on our escape from the schools; fewer
and fewer schools require any of it at all. This is, they tell us, an age
of technology, and that what we need to know is how to program computers,
not how to devise grammatical sentences in orderly sequence.

As it happens, computers work by reading and devising grammatical sentences
in orderly sequence. The ``language'' is different, but that's how
they work. Their ``rules'' are far more stringent and unforgiving
than the rules of discursive prose. When we read a sentence whose subject
and verb don't agree, we don't reject it as meaningless and useless. We
may shake our heads and sigh a little, but we know what the poor fellow
meant, and we go on. When the computer ``reads'' a ``sentence''
with an equivalent error, it simply spits it out and refuses to work. That's
how we can tell which are the machines and which the people; the people
will swallow anything. And you will swallow anything if you believe that
we can teach all that computer stuff to whole herds of people who haven't
been able to master the elementary logic of subject-verb agreement.

The logic of writing is simply logic; it is not some system of arbitrary
conventions interesting only to those who write a lot. All logical thought
goes on in the form of statements and statements about statements. We can
make those statements only in language, even if that language be a different
symbol system like mathematics. If we cannot make those statements and statements
about statements logically, clearly, and coherently, then we cannot think
and make knowledge. People who cannot put strings of sentences together
in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the
technology of writing is preventing thought.




\chapter{The Voice of Sisera}




The invention of discursive prose liberated the mind of man from the limitations
of the individual's memory. We can now ``know'' not just what we
can store in our heads, and, as often as not misplace among the memorabilia
and used slogans. Nevertheless, that invention made concrete and permanent
one of the less attractive facts of language. It called forth a new ``mode''
of language and provided yet another way in which to distinguish social
classes from one another.

Fleeing the lost battle on the plain of Megiddo, General Sisera is said
to have stopped off at the tent of Heber the Kenite. Heber himself was out,
but his wife, Jael, was home and happy to offer the sweaty warrior a refreshing
drink -- ``a bottle of milk'' in fact, the Bible says. (That seems
to find something in translation.) It was a kindly and generous gesture,
especially since Sisera asked nothing more than a drink of water.

Having drunk his fill, the tired Sisera stretched out for a little nap and
told Jael to keep careful watch, for he had good reason to expect that the
Jews who had cut up his army that day were probably looking around for him.
Jael said, Sure, sure, don't worry, and when Sisera fell asleep, that crafty
lady took a hammer and a tent spike and nailed him through the temples fast
to the earth.

I suppose that we are meant to conclude that the Kenites, not themselves
Jews, were nevertheless right-thinking folk and that Jael's act had a meaning
that was both political and religious. I'm not so sure. I'd like to know,
before deciding, just what language it was that Sisera used when he asked
for that drink of water.

Scholars think that Sisera was probably the leader of an invading Hittite
army, but the details are not important. What is important is that he was
obviously a would-be conqueror in a land not his own. He had, until quite
recently, been successful; he had come a long way with his iron chariots,
powerful weapons that the Jews lacked and that would have won yet another
battle if it hadn't been for a spell of bad weather. He was a successful
foreign invader from a technologically superior culture. Can you suppose
that he felt any obligation or even curious desire to learn the language
of the Jews? Wouldn't they have seemed to him just another bunch of local
primitives, in no important way to be distinguished from other such bunches
he had already overcome? As for the tent-dwelling Kenites, a meager clan
of impoverished nomads, who would ever bother to learn their ignorant babble?
I'm willing to bet a brand-new Fowler against a D minus freshman theme that
Sisera spoke to Jael in his language, not hers, and loudly. With gestures.
What Jael did, a little later, was actually an early example of linguistic
consciousness-raising. Hers, not his.

Now, your typical American tourist in Naples doesn't usually get a wooden
spike through his head for shouting pidgin English at the natives -- a little
diarrhea, maybe, but that's about it. Roman legionnaires in Gaul, however,
and British soldiers in India did get some of each, once in a while. Conquered
peoples hate, along with everything else about them, the language of the
conquerors, and with good reason, for the language is itself a weapon. It
keeps the vanquished in the dark about meanings and intentions, and it makes
it extremely difficult to obey commands that had damn well better be obeyed,
and {\itshape schnell},  too. Whatever it was that Sisera said to Jael that afternoon,
it must have had something like the emotional effect of {\itshape ``Juden heraus!''}
shouted in the streets of a small village in eastern Poland.

History is rich in examples of Siseranism. The language of the Cro-Magnons
must have had upon the Neanderthals the same effect as Norman French had
upon the English after 1066. Furthermore, it isn't only the victors and
the vanquished who dwell together speaking different tongues. The war doesn't
really go on forever. When the fighting is over -- for a while -- the victors
and the vanquished often settle down to become the rulers and the ruled.
They continue to speak different languages. Their languages may in time
merge and become one, but they will still find a way to speak different
languages. That is the case with us.

The arrangement offers some advantages on both sides. The powerful can write
the laws and the rules in their own language so that the weak come before
the courts and the commissions at a double disadvantage. (You'll see what
that means when they audit your tax return.) The ruling class also becomes
the ``better'' class, and its language must be the language of literature
and philosophy and science and all the gentle arts. The subjects, whose
language is deemed insufficiently elegant or complex to express such matters,
are thus excluded from the business of the intellect in all its forms and
relegated to tradecraft and handiwork, for which their rudimentary babble
is just about good enough. On the other hand, the rudimentary babble of
the riffraff is, after all, a language that the rulers don't, and generally
don't care to, understand. The language of the subjects serves them as a
form of ``secret'' talking, so that servants can mutter, not quite
inaudibly, appropriate comments on the lord and his lady. It's the same
kind of revenge that schoolboys used to take by learning fluent, rapid pig
latin to use in the presence of pompous and pedantic masters.

The linguistic distinction between the rulers and the ruled seems so right,
especially to the rulers, that where it doesn't occur naturally it gets
invented. Thus the upper classes in Russia in the times of the czars were
put to the trouble of learning French, a more ``civilized'' tongue,
and reserved their Russian for speaking to servants, very small children,
and domestic animals. Thus the French upper classes from time to time have
gone through paroxysms of tortured elegance in language in order to distinguish
themselves yet further from their inferiors. It would have seemed reasonable,
and handsomely symmetrical, too, for the French aristocrats to have learned
Russian, saving their French for servants, very small children, and domestic
animals, but your standard everyday French aristocrat would rather drink
out of his fingerbowl than learn a barbarous babble like Russian. It's interesting
to notice that in both those cultures certain linguistic distinctions were
ultimately obliterated, at least for a while, by bloody revolutions. True,
there may have been some other causes as well, but these little lessons
of history should cause at least an occasional sleepless night for those
of our rulers who like to speak in a language not understood by the people.
We don't have two languages, of course, so those who rule us have the same
problem that once troubled the French aristocracy. They have to devise an
elaborate language-within-a-language that we can understand only sometimes
and even then uncertainly. It is a mistake to think that the language of
the bureaucrats is merely an ignorant, garbled jargon. They may not always
know what they are doing, but what they are doing is not haphazard. It works,
too.

We like to make jokes, for instance, about the language of the tax forms.
Heh heh, we chuckle, ain't them bureaucrats a caution? Just listen to this
here, Madge. Them bureaucrats, however, don't chuckle at all, and if you'd
like to see just what the term ``stony silence'' really means, try
chuckling at their jargon when they haul you down to the tax office to ask
how you managed to afford that cabin cruiser. Even your own lawyer will
start looking around for some lint to pick off his trousers.

And as long as we have a lawyer in view, ain't they something? We read with
pitying shakes of the head the disclaimers and demurrers at the bottom of
the contract. We like to imagine that we, just plain folks, are somehow,
deep down where it really counts, superior to those pointy-headed word-mongers
with all their hereinafters. Nevertheless, we do what they tell us to do.
We always remember that if we can't figure out from their language what
we're required to do, and if we therefore fail to do it, it isn't the writers
of the jargon who will be called to account. Our sense of superiority is
an illusion, a convenient illusion from somebody's point of view; in fact,
when we read the contract, we are afraid. It is the intent of that language
to make us afraid. It works. Now{\bfseries  that}  is effective writing.

Imagine that the postman brings you a letter from the Water and Sewer Department
or the Bureau of Mines or some such place. Any right-thinking American will
eye even the envelope in the same way he would eye some sticky substance
dripping from the underparts of his automobile. Things get worse. You open
the letter and see at once these words: ``You are hereby notified\ldots '' How do you feel? Are you keen to read on? But you will, won't
you? Oh, yes. You will.

Here comes another letter. This one doesn't even have a stamp. It carries
instead the hint that something very bad will happen to any mere citizen
caught using this envelope for his own subversive purposes. You open it
and read: ``It has been brought to the attention of this office\ldots '' Do you throw it out at that point because you find it too preposterous
to think that an office can have an attention? Do you immediately write
a reply: ``Dear So-and-so, I am surprised and distressed by the rudeness
of your first ten words, especially since they are addressed to one of those
who pay your salary. Perhaps you're having a bad day. Why don't you write
again and say something else?'' You do not. In fact, you turn pale and
wonder frantically which of your misdeeds has been revealed. Your anxiety
is increased by that passive verb -- that's what it's for -- which suggests
that this damaging exposure has been made not by an envious neighbor or
a vengeful merchant or an ex-girlfriend or any other perfectly understandable,
if detestable, human agent, but by the very nature of the universe. ``It
has been brought.'' This is serious.

Among the better class of Grammarians, that construction is known as the
Divine Passive. It intends to suggest that neither the writer nor anyone
else through whose head you might like to hammer a blunt wooden spike can
be held accountable for anything in any way. Like an earthquake or a volcanic
eruption, this latest calamity must be accepted as an act of God. God may
well be keeping count of the appearances of the Divine Passive.

Another classic intimidation with which to begin a letter is: ``According
to our records\ldots '' It reminds you at once, with that plural pronoun,
that the enemy outnumbers you, and the reference to ``records''
makes it clear that they've got the goods. There is even a lofty pretense
to fairness, as though you were being invited to bring forth {\bfseries your} 
records to clear up this misunderstanding. You know, however, that they
don't suspect for an instant that there's anything wrong in their records.
Besides, you don't {\bfseries have}  any records, as they damn well know.

Such frightening phrases share an important attribute. They are not things
that ordinary people are likely to say, or even write, to one another except,
of course, in certain unpleasant circumstances. We can see their intentions
when we put them into more human contexts: ``My dear Belinda, You are
hereby notified\ldots '' conveys a message that ought to infuriate even
the dullest of Belindas. Why is it then that we are not infuriated when
we bear or read such words addressed to us by bureaucrats? We don't even
stop to think that those words make up a silly verbal paradox; the only
context in which they can possibly appear is the one in which they are not
needed at all. No meaning is added to ``Your rent is overdue'' when
the landlord writes, ``You are hereby notified that your rent is overdue.''
What {\bfseries is}  added is the tone of official legality, and the presumption
that one of the rulers is addressing one of the ruled. The voice of Sisera
puts you in your place, and, strangely enough, you go there.

We Americans make much of our egalitarian society, and we like to think
we are not intimidated by wealth and power. Still, we are. There are surely
many reasons for that, and about most of them we can do nothing, it seems.
But one of the reasons is the very language in which the wealthy and powerful
speak to us. When we hear it, something ancient stirs in us, and we take
off our caps and hold them to our chests as we listen. About {\bfseries that} 
we {\bfseries could}  do something -- all it takes is some education. That must
have been in Jefferson's mind when he thought about the importance of universal
education in a society of free people. People who are automatically and
unconsciously intimidated by the sound of a language that they cannot themselves
use easily will never be free. Jefferson must have imagined an America in
which all citizens would be able, when they felt like it, to address one
another as members of the same class. That we cannot do so is a sore impediment
to equality, but, of course, a great advantage to those who {\bfseries can}  use
the English of power and wealth.

It would be easier to see bureaucratic language for what it is if only the
governors and bureaucrats did in fact speak a foreign tongue. When the Normans
ruled England anyone could tell the French was French and English, English.
It was the government that might, rarely, pardon you for your crimes, but
it needed a friend to forgive you for your sins. Words like ``pardon''
and ``forgive'' were clearly in different languages, and, while
either might have been translated by the other, they still meant subtly
different acts. They still do, even though they are both thought of as English
words now. Modern English has swallowed up many such distinctions, but not
all. We still know that hearts are broken, not fractured. This is the kind
of distinction Winston Churchill had in mind when he advised writers to
choose the native English word whenever possible rather than a foreign import.
This is good advice, but few can heed it in these days. The standard American
education does not provide the knowledge out of which to make such choices.


\chapter{``Let's face it Fellows''}

The Jiukiukwe have, you will remember, many different verb conjugations
so that they may speak appropriately to their relatives. They have, also,
all those words to designate every imaginable degree of relationship so
that they will be able to choose exactly the right verb form to match those
relatives. This seems to us quaint and curious and probably typical of a
bunch of shiftless savages who haven't enough to do. Some similar system,
however, is not at all unusual in languages. We have such a system in English,
although it isn't always a matter of grammatical form and is much less complicated
than the Jiukiukwe verb system.

People who speak the same language are always announcing not only their
own membership in a society but also their recognition of the membership
of others. When you present a paper to the Philosophical Association, you
choose your diction and devise your sentences in such a way as to suggest
that they haven't made too big a mistake in inviting you. When you are out
boozing with your motorcycle buddies, you do the same. The choices are available
in the language, and, just as well as the Jiukiukwe, we can make our language
match the social meaning of the occasion upon which we speak. For them,
the language works well because it can make the distinctions important to
them: familial distinctions. For us, the language works well because we
can make the distinctions important to us: social, educational, and economic
distinctions. Those distinctions simply do not exist for the Jiukiukwe,
and, just as we are amused by their vast vocabulary of family relationships,
they would laugh at our swarms of words to make subtle distinctions in social,
educational, and economic status.

It would bewilder them, for instance, to discover that there are words
like ``sofa'' and ``couch'' that mean the same thing but
that we use the one or the other according to our social status. They would
find it hard to understand why we claim to have ``correct'' forms
like ``It is I'' but feel perfectly free to say ``It's me''
under certain circumstances. They would marvel at our seemingly capricious
use of our few surviving subjunctives and shake their heads at our extensive
arrays of near synonyms among which we have to choose with delicate precision.
When is a co-worker a colleague? When is a colleague an associate? When
is an associate an accomplice? When is an accomplice a partner? When is
a partner a sidekick? We know which word to use because these arrays of
words point at cultural values familiar to us. The poor Jiukiukwe tribesman
trying to learn English would ultimately have to learn our culture and all
its unspoken values and beliefs before he could make such choices. This
is true of anyone who undertakes to learn any language. Among other things,
a language is an elaborate and complete display of the ideas of the culture
that speaks it.

If you could ask a Jiukiukwe why he takes such pains to address his mother's
only brother's eldest daughter in just that way, he would probably have
to say that he does it because it's ``right.'' He's right. That's
why we do things like that too. They're right. They are ``right,''
however, entirely in a social sense. Language is arbitrary, but it's not
anarchic. Although there's no reason why this or that in a language should
be ``right'' and something else ``wrong,'' it does not follow
that you can do whatever you please in it. At some point, of course, when
you wander too far from what is ``right'' you'll cease to be intelligible.
But long before you reach that point you will send out the news that you
are not a member in good standing around here.

Politeness is not a special social refinement {\bfseries added on, if possible},  
to the everyday life of members of the same culture. It has its origin in
something far more important than social convention, and it is expressed
primarily in language, which serves to display the values of the culture.
The origin of politeness is probably a religious feeling. One of the other
worlds into which language points is the world of the numinous. It is in
myth and legend, therefore, that we can detect the origin of politeness
in language.

Imagine that you are reading a fairy tale. Here's a cocky young prince
on his way to kill some monster who guards the water of life. The prince
stops to eat his lunch in cool shade by a brook. A loathsome frog asks for
a bite of his sandwich, but the hero will not lower himself to sup with
a slimy amphibian and says so in as many words. Well, there's no doubt.
He's going to come to a bad end. When his younger brother comes by next
year, however he'll be glad to give that frog bites of his peanut butter
sandwich, a little Kool-Aid, and even some polite chitchat. You can just
bet that that boy will bring back not only the water of life but a comely
princess as well.

Behind this common theme lies the suspicion that the palpable world we
see before us conceals other worlds from our view. What inklings we have
of those worlds we have in the suggestions of our language, and it is in
our language that we have access to those worlds. Almost every culture has
a taboo against being rude to strangers. Ours has it, and a good thing too,
or you'd never be able to find a bathroom in a department store. The purpose
of this taboo seems to be to prevent us from saying or doing anything that
might have some bad consequences for us in another world. You never know
who a stranger {\bfseries really}  is, and it never hurts to be polite. In some
cultures, even more care is taken, and woodsmen apologize to trees before
they chop them down, and fishermen ask forgiveness of the fish. After all,
what can you lose?

Our culture is not much concerned with the numinous, but in language
we preserve many of the marks of a culture that {\bfseries is}.  We talk to animals
and machines. We talk to teddy bears and tools. We say, of course, that
we don't really mean to communicate with these things, but an anthropologist
from another planet might not see it quite that way. We talk in different
words, too, depending on how we are related to the persons we address. In
this we are not different from the Jiukiukwe. We are different, however,
in that we need more finesse in our language to get those modes ``right''
consistently, since we haven't the clearly visible grammatical apparatus
in which to express them. All the Jiukiukwe have to do to speak in the proper
fashion is to get their verb forms right. We have to do much more, not only
in speaking ``correctly'' but in discerning exactly that mode of
speech which is suitable to the circumstances. In fact, the task is so difficult
that we often say ``the hell with it'' and speak any old way we
can. Could they know this, the Jiukiukwe, and the extraterrestrial anthropologist
as well, might conclude that we are a culture presently in the process of
disintegration, a culture that no longer cares to represent its values in
its language.

The Jiukiukwe who speaks his language accurately speaks it politely,
that is to say, in precisely that way which best suits the context in which
he speaks. Speaking so, he pronounces his allegiance to the values that
hold his culture together. We do even more than that when we speak to each
other, and especially when we write to each other, in a mode suitable to
the context. Ours is, unlike the Jiukiukwe's, a highly technological society.
To get this society through the day, more or less successfully, we have
to perform with precision thousands and thousands of tasks. For us to proceed
in good order requires a vast company of citizens at all social levels who
are dependably accurate and precise in whatever job they may hire themselves
out to do.

Accordingly, we have traditionally taught the young of this tribe certain
disciplines intended to inculcate the habits of accuracy and precision.
One such discipline, for instance, is mathematics. All schoolchildren ask,
when they finally think to ask it, why they have to study things like geometry
and algebra when any reasonable view of adult life reveals that grown-ups
are not called upon to do geometry and algebra. In fact, grown-ups have
all forgotten those things, as any child will discover when he asks for
help with his homework. We used to answer that we taught them those things
not so that they might do them in later life, although some few must and
will, of course, but because such studies cause certain habits to form in
the mind. Nowadays, we simply agree with the children that geometry and
algebra are useless, and instead of wasting all that time we let them rap
about interpersonal adjustment instead. This does not somehow, make them
``well adjusted,'' but it does provide that the techniques and devices
that they will someday be responsible for won't be very well adjusted either.
Even Steven.

Many similar habit-forming studies are possible in language. Consider
spelling. Strictly speaking, there is no spelling in language. Spelling
is peculiar to writing; language is a set of sounds and gestures. The sounds
either make intelligible speech or they don't. The Jiukiukwe children don't
study spelling, and, as things stand between us now, we would not be able
to explain such a strange business to the Jiukiukwe at all. In fact, you
can understand the social and technological importance of the study of spelling
just by imagining all the things a Jiukiukwe tribesman would have to understand
first before you could tell him why we make our children study spelling.
Once he knew all that stuff, though, he would also be able to see the sense
of studying other absurd things like punctuation and capitalization.

Furthermore, once he knew all that stuff, as we, of course, do, he might
be able to see the social and technological meaning of this sad story: There
was a young lady in Pennsylvania who was incensed when she found two typographical
errors and even an error in grammar in her local newspaper. Fortunately
for the course of Western culture, she knew the right thing to do, and she
did it. She fired off a stiff note of protest to the editor. And who better
to do it? She was, after all, a schoolteacher, and rightly mindful of the
baleful influence of the popular media on her impressionable charges.Among other things, she wrote: ``In writing I teach my third graders
to proofread their work and I don't expect them to find all mistakes. But,
let's face it Fellows you are not 8 and 9 year olds and this artical should
have never gotten past you let alone printed in the form it was.'' That's
what she wrote. Those are her words, her syntax, her punctuation, her capitalization,
her spelling. Her spelling of ``artical'' appears in three more
places, so it's no fluke, and in one place the word ``allowed''
comes out as ``aloud.''Here's another sad story: Your car has broken down at night in a strange
town in Alabama, perhaps. A man who claims to be a mechanic is trying to
find the spark plugs. You point them out, but he is unable to remove them
because he is turning the wrench the wrong way.Here's an even sadder: Just as you are about to sink into unconsciousness
in the operating room, you hear the surgeon asking the nurse which of those
doohickeys are the clamps. Good luck to you. Good luck also to a batch of
third graders out in Pennsylvania.

The schoolteacher's errors are what we call ``small.'' An equivalent
failure of technique in the man who has checked your airplane might be something
like forgetting to tighten one lousy little bolt. There may well be a good
chance that this trivial oversight will {\bfseries not}  kill everybody on board,
depending on exactly which bolt it was. But who knows? Airplanes are very
tricky devices, and there may well be some bolt or other that had damn well
better be tightened if the contraption is to fly. However, when a schoolteacher
writes ``artical'' for ``article'' and overlooks a few silly
little commas, her students do not at once crash to earth in flames. Not
at once.



There is a sense in which her children don't have to study English at
all. Even third graders can say very complex things, quite understandably,
without having, or needing, any notions at all about grammar and spelling.
When we do set about to teach them a language in which they are already
at home, perhaps even fluent, we have two things in mind. One of them is
a social goal: a social goal not much different from what we have in mind
when we teach them to use knives and forks at the table. Children who grow
up without having learned to use knives and forks at the table may be charming
and valuable human beings, but they will often be passed over for promotion.
Furthermore, it seems unlikely that only{\bfseries  that}  portion of their rearing
could have been neglected. When you have lunch with a man who eats his lasagna
with his fingers, you have reason to suspect that he may have one or two
other social deficiencies.



Accordingly, we try to teach our children to spell correctly because,
for one thing, they'll look bad if they spell incorrectly. It may, in the
course of their lives, even cost them money if they can't spell. As things
are with us, we would generally like our children to make more money rather
than less, if only because so many of us are supported by the taxes other
people pay. But it's more than that, of course; bad spelling just isn't
respectable. You may, perhaps, want to lament this fact. You are free to
do so. The fact remains.



Consider the social consequences that might be visited on that third-grade
teacher. Suppose your child were in her class--the chances of this, by the
way, are about even. There she is, that teacher who teaches her third graders
to proofread their work, loftily not expecting them to find all their mistakes.
Are you confident that she would be able to see whether or not they {\bfseries had} 
found all their mistakes? We know one thing: She wouldn't be able to see
that one of her students misspelled ``article.'' She seems likely,
also, to be unable to distinguish between ``aloud'' and ``allowed.''
She will certainly be confused, and without knowing that she is confused,
about some conventional punctuation and capitalization.



Does it seem possible that those two words -- ``article'' and
``allowed'' -- are the {\bfseries only}  words that she can't spell, and
that it was only a calamitous coincidence that they happened to appear in
her letter? It does not. A person who can misspell ``article'' and
``allowed'' can probably misspell something else. Would that something
else be one other word? No, it would be more than one other word. Two? Ten?
Seven hundred fifty-three? Does it matter? It does not.



What does matter is that you -- remember, you're still supposing that
your child is in her class -- can now pick up the phone and call your neighbor
down the street, the one you voted for last November when he was elected
to the school board. You can don righteous indignation or mild bewilderment
or anything in between, but, however you do it, you'll be able to speak
as one having knowledge. You know how to spell those words, right? So what
the hell is going on here? Who hires these people? Where do they come from?
What could be more satisfying than a legitimate and documented complaint
against those people in the schools who tell us so haughtily that they know
what they're doing?



The questions are good ones. Who {\bfseries does}  hire teachers who can't
spell? Where do they come from? The questions grow more ominous the more
we think about them. Just as we suspect that this teacher's ineptitude in
spelling is not limited to those two words, so we must suspect that she
has other ineptitudes as well. We see already that her education has been
less than perfect. Is her knowledge of arithmetic, for instance, also less
than perfect? How well informed is she about history and science? Those
very misspellings -- don't they seem characteristic of a person who simply
hasn't done much reading? That is, after all, the way most of us learn to
spell correctly. When you've seen ``allowed'' and ``aloud''
thousands of times on the page, you just know which is which. And if this
teacher hasn't done much reading, how likely is she to be well informed
about history and science, or any of those things in which we expect her
to instruct our children?



Well, who {\bfseries did}  hire her? Some principal, presumably, or some committee,
or somebody. Let's imagine that it was a committee. What did they look for
in her credentials? In her letter of application, were there errors? Would
the members of the committee have been able to detect them? Would some of
them say, even now, that a silly misspelled word here and there is too trivial
to worry about?



And where {\bfseries did}  she come from? Some school graduated her, and some
board granted her a certificate to teach. Did she just slip through the
cracks in the system? Is she the only member of her class, the only graduate
of her college, whose spelling is shaky? Of all of those teachers and incipient
teachers, is she the only one who doesn't seem to have done much reading?
The professors who wrote her references --- did they mention that she
had some problems with spelling? Did they {\bfseries know}  that she had some
problems with spelling? Had they read any of her writing? Did she {\bfseries do} 
any writing? As much writing as she did reading, perhaps? If your physician's
elementary training in anatomy were as uncertain as this teacher's spelling,
would you think it too trivial to worry about?



This is not a quiz; don't answer any of those questions. For now, leave
it at this: If social acceptability is one of the goals of the study of
English, it will be but poorly served by this teacher and, it seems, just
as poorly served by the system that made her a teacher. But there is another
more important goal in mind when we subject children to the study of a language
they already know. It is the habit of correctness and precision.




\chapter{Trifles}



Those who have the habit of correctness and precision can do things by
design; those who don't usually have to depend on luck. And when we fly
in airplanes or undergo surgery or file our tax forms, we feel better if
we can depend on something more than luck. It isn't luck that rings the
right phone in Honolulu --- it's simply correct dialing. (Getting a dial
tone is luck.) We are a notably superstitious people, but we aren't superstitious
enough to believe that our keys fit our locks by a marvelous stroke of good
fortune. Our world is more and more crowded with things that will work only
if lots of people have been correct and precise. That they seem to work
less often and less well is a sad fact directly related to the third-grade
teacher who can't spell. Here are some other people who can't do things:



In May of 1978 the executive secretary of the Michigan Board of Pharmacy
wrote, in a letter to a Michigan physician: ``Costs of administration
of the act is considered and controlled substances fees merit an increase
because of administration costs.''



A Department of Transportation manual suggests that ``If a guest
becomes intoxicated,'' you might ``take his or her car keys and
send them home in a taxi.''



George Washington University offers after-hours courses for the convenience
of federal employees. Among its offerings you can find ``Business and
Proffessional Speaking,'' and ``Effective Writting.'' The latter
is a noncredit course, which is some consolation.



What do such small errors mean? What do we know when we see that a high-ranking
government official cannot, invariably, make his verbs and subjects agree?
Do you suppose that {\bfseries he}  is as tolerant of small errors in other matters
as he would probably want us to be in this matter? Would he say of equivalent
mistakes in his bank statement: ``Well, a dollar here, a dollar there---it's
just a little mistake''?



And the instructor who is going to teach that course in Effective Writting---will
he ignore, should he ignore, silly mistakes in spelling in his students'
papers? After all, English spelling is notoriously difficult. Should we
recognize that ``writting'' is just a careless error, a slip of
the finger, a minor and momentary lapse? Are mistakes of this order worthy
of serious concern?



Yes.



It is true that English is a difficult and complicated language. It is
also true that, like any language in regular use, it's always changing,
perhaps very slowly, but changing. Nevertheless, in some way it is simple
and permanent enough so that anyone who uses it can safely spend his whole
life using singular verbs to go with singular subjects and plural verbs
to go with plural subjects. That's what English does, and some call it correct.
Sometimes we don't know whether a subject is singular or plural: Is the
enemy retreating or are the enemy retreating? That's one of the things that
make English entertaining, but it's not very important. There's no question,
however, about ``costs,'' and when the executive secretary of the
Michigan Board of Pharmacy says that costs is considered, he is wrong. He
has not been overcome by the awesome complexities of the English language,
he has not failed to find the appropriate expression of a complicated idea,
he has not violated the metaphoric consistency of his letter, he has simply
made a mistake. It's not much of a mistake; it's something like the mistake
a pharmacist might make when he gives you the wrong pills.



Of course, we take the pharmacist's mistake more seriously, since it
might result in sudden death or at least convulsions. But the executive
secretary's mistake is still an example of careless imprecision which, in
this case, has simply not resulted in sudden death or convulsions. For the
concerns of our society, though, the executive secretary's mistake is {\bfseries more} 
significant than the pharmacist's. It suggests that a man in an important
position, a functionary of government, is careless and thoughtless in doing
his work and that he seems not to have learned the habit of precision and
correctness.



Look again at what he has written: ``Costs of administration of the
act is considered and controlled substances fees merit an increase because
of administration costs.'' Even our third-grade teacher could probably
point out that the poor fellow was confused because the word that precedes
the verb is ``act.'' Nevertheless, it isn't the {\bfseries act}  that's
being considered, it's the{\bfseries  costs}, so we say that they are being considered.
There, that's not so hard, is it? So how could an executive secretary make
a silly little mistake like that? He probably just wasn't paying attention,
that's all, and his friends would surely say that just as though it were
an excuse. But it isn't an excuse; it is simply an explanation. If he wasn't
paying attention to what he had to say, to what {\bfseries was}  he paying attention?
Isn't it his job to pay attention to his job? Isn't it part of his job to
write letters to physicians who ask questions? Is this the only time he
has failed to pay attention?



Difficult as English is in many ways, this is one way in which it is
not difficult: It's not only possible, it's easy, to find the right verb
to go with ``costs.'' An executive secretary who fails in this ought
to be as unthinkable as a statistician who subtracts 6 from 9 and gets 2.
If a statistician or your computer at the bank subtracted 6 from 9 and got
2, you would not feel mildly irritated and amused. You'd ask what the hell
is going on here, and you'd become deeply suspicious, wondering what the
hell {\bfseries else}  is going on here. If this work is incorrect in such a small
and easy matter, it seems likely that it will contain mistakes in large
matters, large mistakes for which we would never have looked if we hadn't
seen the small one.



When we look again at the executive secretary's sentence, we see that
the silly little mistake, as bad as it is, is only a tiny indicator of a
much larger failure of precision. Even provided the correct verb, his sentence
says that costs of administration are considered and that these fees have
to go up because of costs of administration. Why does he say the same thing
twice? Is it because he doesn't have to pay for the paper or the typist's
time? Is it because he is still thinking about something else and doesn't
notice? Could it be because his case is weak and needs empty reiterations?



That unfortunate executive secretary has made a little mistake, a mistake
much narrower than a church door, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve. Unfortunately,
though, if you ask for him tomorrow, you won't find him a grave man. You'll
just find him.



Not many years ago, it was a popular sport to collect and publish silly
mistakes made by schoolchildren in their compositions. Many books of these
so-called boners were printed for the delectation of grown-ups who laughed
and chuckled. ``Heh, heh, ain't they cute.'' Sometimes venturesome
publishers went even further and printed collections of idiocies from the
notes that schoolchildren brought from home. These were usually pathetic
examples from barely literate people, but we chuckled and laughed some more.
Now, like desperate drillers looking for new pockets of gas, we publish
collections of the pomposities and malapropisms of politicians and bureaucrats.
Again we chuckle and laugh. We don't find them quite as cute as those cunning
kids, but still we laugh. It makes us feel superior. And because we feel
superior we forgive; and we're willing to believe that a member of the city
council, say, or a senator, shouldn't be judged too harshly merely by the
inanity of his words. We'll still reelect him. After all, anybody can make
a mistake. We make {\bfseries this}  mistake because it does not occur to us that
there is no other way to judge the work of a mind except through its words,
and we pay attention only long enough to be amused. In fact, however, those
silly little mistakes always mean something important.



That line from the Department of Transportation means something. It's
funny, right? ``If a guest becomes intoxicated\ldots take his or her
car keys and send them home in a taxi.'' Heh, heh. We imagine the conversation:
``Uh, listen, would you, uh, mind taking these keys to, uh, Four Seventy-one
Laurel Street, driver?'' ``The keys? You want I should drive them
keys to Laurel Street?'' ``Yeah, you see, well it. doesn't matter,
I mean, just take these keys\ldots '' ``Look, Mac, it's late. What
is this? Some kinda gag or something?'' Very funny.



It's so funny that we don't discern the failure of mind that has caused
that silly mistake. It's a miniature example showing how ideology numbs
the brain and forbids precision. While we're giggling at the car keys going
home in the taxi, we forget all about that ``his or her'' business.
The writer of this sentence was so worried about a possible charge of sexism
that he lost the power of rational thought and speech. He had to say ``his
or her'' because a simple ``his'' would have been one of those
now unacceptable forms, and because we are now required to assert that women
are also people and even that they are just as likely as men to get drunk.
So there. Having implied all that, however, and most ungallantly, if you
ask me, the writer had made himself a problem. Could he say ``take his
or her keys and send him or her home in a taxi''? He could not. First
of all, it sounds lousy --- let's give him credit for recognizing that.
Second, and maybe he didn't recognize this, that would be a clever, satiric
comment on the motive that inspired ``his or her'' in the first
place. It would have made a silly form sound even sillier. So, what to do?
Ah, of course. When in doubt about those personal adjectives and pronouns,
pluralize! Plurals have no sex. It's every person for theirselves!



So we get ``send them home in a taxi'' and we think it's funny.
It is, however, the sign of a failure to solve a problem. It's not a very
big problem, and the solver, or the should-be solver, is someone who is
hired and paid by the taxpayers to solve just such problems, even should
they be hard. What could have been in his mind? Could he have been worried
that his boss would get a stiff note from Gloria Steinem insisting that
the Department of Transportation take due note of the fact that women also
get drunk? Could he or she have feared that his or her boss would call him
or her on the carpet? Or could it have been simple ignorance?



This example is more portentous than the executive secretary's verb.
Like the third-grade teacher's letter, this is an example of a corporate
failure. Those car keys showed up in a published and widely circulated manual.
You and I paid for it. We paid for the compiling, the writing, the rewriting,
the editing, the proofreading, and everything else. How many people were
involved in letting this silly mistake out into the world? Two things are
possible. Not one of them noticed, or at least one of them noticed. If nobody
noticed, we're being served by a pack of careless ignoramuses. If somebody
noticed, then at least one of them is not a careless ignoramus but some
kind of cynical elitist, I guess, who says, What the hell, your ordinary
citizen in the street doesn't have enough brains to see the difference ---
let it stand. And, he, too, might also have been a little bit afraid of
Gloria Steinem.



The third of these examples is surely the most trivial, but just as surely
the most interesting. There they are, those thoughtful intellectuals, those
bearers of the glowing lamp of learning down at George Washington University.
Gladly they give their time and expertise to struggling federal file clerks
hoping to rise in the world. It's a good way to pick up an extra buck, too.
And just look---undone by a typist! ``Business and Proffessional Speaking.''
``Effective Writting.'' Great. Can't you just see some silly twit,
chewing gum, thinking about a new hairdo, casually typing some f's and some
t's? Look behind her. See the silly twit who reads what she has typed and
sends it out. And that poor sap who has to teach the course in ``Effective
Writting,'' what's he going to say at the first class meeting? You know
what he's going to say, don't you, {\bfseries if}, that is, he knows the difference
and if any of his eager students know the difference. He's going to be funny.
``Heh, heh, well, I guess we can all see why we need to have a course
like this, eh?''



Everyone knows that English spelling is difficult. People who speak English
are always looking up words in dictionaries, a practice uncommon among speakers
of most other modern languages. We actually have annual nationwide contests
in which scrubbed children perform like well-trained seals and outdo one
another in spelling nifty and almost utterly useless words from ``abiogenetic''
to ``zymurgy.'' We have devised elaborate rules in mnemonics, only
to devise further mnemonics to deal with the exceptions and even the exceptions
to the exceptions. Crackpots ranging from George Bernard Shaw to the man
who opened the first All Nite Diner have undertaken to ``fix'' our
broken spelling. So far, nothing has worked. The next logical step is simply
to give up. Let her spell it ``writting'' even ``ritting,''
who cares? We all know what she means, don't we?



But the question is not: Can we understand this typist? It is: How did
this typist come to be, and what does this mean for us all? There are, it
happens, some ways in which the spelling of English is perfectly regular
and easy to learn. Any fool can see quickly enough that that double consonant
in ``knitting'' is one of the few, grudging accommodations that
written English makes to spoken English. One of the wonders of English is
the way the written and the spoken (writen and spokken?) forms do disregard
each other. Like distant cousins long alienated by a family feud, each goes
its own way as though the other didn't exist. It's a rare treat to find
them in agreement. But who does find them in agreement? People who speak
English? No. Their agreement is not visible to people who speak English;
it is visible, and often and regularly visible, only to people who {\bfseries read
} English. Making this distinction in written English is automatic to
people who have done some reading. But to those for whom that double consonant
business is nothing more than a statutory precept left over from the seventh
grade, the distinction is not always available. For such, the distinction
between ``writing'' and ``writting'' is a matter of luck.
We may have to conclude that this unhappy typist is ill-educated and poorly
read.



There is, however, another possibility. It may be that she is, in fact,
an uncompromising ironist. Can it be that she was given a piece of paper
from which to type this bit? Of course. And on that piece of paper, could
someone{\bfseries  else}, the Dean of Extension Studies, say, have written ``writting''?
Perhaps she said to herself, between her teeth, ``Aha. The stupid boob
has done it again. Good. Let him eat it.'' An engaging fantasy, but
deans, of course, don't make mistakes in spelling. The girl will have to
take the rap. She'll have to take the rap for ``proffessional''
too. After all, deans {\bfseries are}  professional. If there's one word they
know how to spell, that's probably it, even though ``professional''
isn't quite as easy to do as ``writing.''



Those of us who know how to spell ``professional'' --- how
did we learn? It wasn't hard. Most of us just had occasion to look at the
word often enough as we read. But there's some logic in this spelling, too.
Any thoughtful mind can figure out that profession, like confession, is
some kind of fession, whatever {\bfseries that}  may be. And a thoughtful mind
notices, too, that pro and con are familiar, we can even find them in company
if we can think a minute and come up with ``provoke'' and ``convoke.''
We don't even have to know how to voke to see elements making structures
in some logical fashion. So in ``professional'' pro is added to
fessional. Easy. You don't have to know any Latin, you don't even have to
know that there is such a thing as Latin, to figure out how to spell ``professional.''
All you need is a working mind and the ability to see likenesses and a little
store of examples. Well, not quite. You also need to have looked at the
word enough times so that something will seem wrong when you see ``proffessional.''
That's the hard part, because it needs the habit of reading.



So how much does it matter? These fry are all very small. And if they
can't read or write much, who cares? So some people make mistakes. Well,
try not to think about them for a while. Think instead about the president
of the University of Arizona, a big fry, who writes as follows in the magazine
sent out to alumni:


\begin{quote}

  
As has been the case for the past several years, the most notable accomplishment
  of the University during 1976-77 was the strides took toward recruiting
  distinguished faculty members. Never before have so many outstanding scholars,
  teachers, and researchers joined our institution. These men and women are
  the very lifeblood of the University. They will hasten the time the university
  reaches its goal of true excellence.

\end{quote}



If some of those outstanding scholars read the alumni magazine, they
may want to hasten something else, but their chagrin will be small compared
with that of those faculty members who've been around for more than a year.
They've just been excluded from the lifeblood, the {\bfseries very}  lifeblood.
Strangely enough, though, even the new faculty, the very lifeblooders, are
given only second place because the ``most notable accomplishment''
is not, in fact, their additions to the rolls, but the ``strides took
toward recruiting'' them.



What a pity. That little paragraph is full, of padding and clich\'{e}s,
but that's what we expect from presidents of all kinds. Their appearances,
after all, are mostly ceremonial, and they are expected to mouth empty and
generally comforting formulae. The president's message is like the interminable
benediction of the with-it young clergyman, emanating Brut, who has been
invited for the first time to the monthly dinner meeting of the Kiwanis.
Who listens? We expect clich\'{e}s. We expect compounded clich\'{e}s
in which {\bfseries mere}  lifeblood is barely thicker than the punch; it has
to be{\bfseries  very}  lifeblood. Excellence? Just excellence? Certainly not.
Down there in Arizona it's {\bfseries true}  excellence or nothing. Faculty are
always distinguished, scholars are always outstanding, accomplishments always
notable, time always hastened, and strides always took.



Would you like to be the president of a large university? It's fun. And,
at least in some ways, it's obviously no more difficult than being a third-grade
teacher or even a typist. Maybe a university president does have to cultivate
the good will of wealthy benefactors so that his life probably isn't as
interesting as a typist's life; nevertheless, the standards of precision
and correctness are the same for both. In both the typist and the president
we expect and find the same kind of workmanship --- a little bit shoddy.
The typist and the president, just like the teacher and the executive secretary,
and the people at the Department of Transportation, are products of a pretentious
but shoddy education. It's the pretensions that make it shoddy.



Our educators, panting after professionalism, are little interested in
being known for a picayune concern with trifles like spelling and punctuation.
They would much rather make the world a better place. They have tried on
the gowns of philosophers, psychologists, and priests. That's why, when
they think of their ``teaching goals,'' they say those things in
the questionnaire. They see themselves as guides to emotional development,
instigators of creative capacities, and molders of moral character. When
they {\bfseries must}  attend to the factual content of some subject, they prefer
to say that they impart that ``general insight into the knowledge of
a discipline.'' Niggling details, like spelling and punctuation, seem
base by contrast with those noble goals. Our educators have established
for us what may be a genuinely new kind of cultural institution --- although
it is something like the Austro-Hungarian Empire --- that stubbornly avoids
those undertakings in which it might succeed and passionately embraces those
in which it must probably fail.




\chapter{The Columbus Gap}



American public education is a remarkable enterprise; it succeeds best
where it fails. Imagine an industry that consistently fails to do what it
sets out to do, a factory where this year's product is invariably sleazier
than last year's but, nevertheless, better than next year's. Imagine a corporation
whose executives are always spending vast sums of money on studies designed
to discover just what it is they are supposed to do and then vaster sums
for further studies on just how to do it. Imagine a plant devoted to the
manufacture of factory seconds to be sold at a loss. Imagine a producer
of vacuum cleaners that rarely work hiring whole platoons of engineers who
will, in time, report that it is, in fact, true that the vacuum cleaners
rarely work, and who will, for a larger fee, be glad to find out why, if
that's possible. If you discover some such outfit, don't invest in it. Unfortunately,
we are all required to invest in public education.



Public education is also an enterprise that regularly blames its clients
for its failures. Education cannot, after all, be expected to deal with
barbarous and sometimes even homicidal students who hate schools and everything
in them, except, perhaps, for smaller kids with loose lunch money. If the
students are dull and hostile, we mustn't blame the schools. We must blame
the parents for their neglect and their bad examples. If the parents are
ignorant and depraved, then we must blame ``society.'' And so forth
--- but not {\bfseries too}  far. Those who lament thus seem not inclined to
ask how ``society'' got to be that way, if it is that way, and whether
or not public education may have made it so.



The theme of the educators' exculpation, in its most common terms, goes
something like this: We educators are being blamed for the corporate failures
of a whole society. Our world is in disarray, convulsed by crime, poverty,
ignorance, hatred, and institutionalized materialism and greed. The public
expects us to cure all these ills, but that's just impossible. We are being
given a bum rap. Besides, we're not getting enough money to do the job.



Well, it is a terrible thing to be held accountable for the sins of the
world, and even worse that such a fate should be visited on such a noble
and self-sacrificing bunch. We'd all feel much better' surely, if we could
only pin all the pains and disorders of the human condition on some institution
better suited to take the rap---General Motors, perhaps, or the Mafia.
Come to think of it, however, General Motors never claimed that it could
cure those pains and disorders; even the Mafia was not so bold. Public education
{\bfseries has}  made such claims.



Our educators have said that they would teach love and the brotherhood
of mankind as well as the importance of brushing after meals. They have
promised to teach social consciousness and environmental awareness, creativity,
ethnic pride, tolerance, sensitivity to interpersonal/intercultural relationships,
and the skills of self-expression, provided, of course, that such skills
didn't involve irrelevant details like spelling and the agreement of subjects
and verbs. They have said that they will straighten everybody out about
sex and venereal disease and the related complications of family life, and
about how to operate voting machines and balance checkbooks. They have invited
Avon ladies to rap with third graders about their career objectives. They
have undertaken to engender in naturally self-centered and anarchic children
a profound respect for the folkways of migrant workers and the peculiarities
of octogenarians. All of this, and much more, they promise us.



General Motors did not presume to promise us those things. Even the Mafia,
perhaps the only enterprise in the country that could actually achieve such
results in its own peculiar fashion, refrained from making such offers.
Unlike public education, General Motors and the Mafia are modest, medium-sized
enterprises fully aware of their limitations. Furthermore, each of them,
in its own way, does have to do some palpable work for its money, but public
education is guaranteed a handsome income whether it works or not. In fact,
the less it works, the larger the income it can demand. What kind of nation
would this be, after all, if we refused to invest more and more money in
the pursuit of such noble and splendid goals?



Very few Americans will recall asking the educators to pursue such goals.
It was the educators who decided not only that such an enterprise was mandated
by the people but that it belonged properly in the public schools. They
are experts, right? Who are we to say what they should or shouldn't ---
or could or couldn't --- do? Who are we to go against the will of the
people? Anyway, all of those things are just wonderful. It is possible,
though, that we wouldn't now be blaming educators for not doing them if
they hadn't assured us that they could and would do them. We hold no grudge
against the crackpot next door who is working on a perpetual-motion machine
unless he has told us that he could make one and separated us from lots
of our money to buy custom-made magnets and extra-large rubber bands.



Most of us {\bfseries will}  recall that somewhere in our history, maybe it
was back in Jefferson's time, we {\bfseries did}  ask the schools to teach everybody
to read and write and cipher. Somehow, as hard as it may be to teach those
things, it does seem a more modest undertaking than teaching love and tolerance
and the brotherhood of all mankind. We may have expressed a few other desires
--- that the children should learn something of history, their own history
especially, and of the literature and art that have not solved the ills
of the human condition at all, but have made them clear and concrete and
all too human. We did hope that the children would learn something of science
and its methodology, by which we can understand and work at least some of
the things in the world. We did ask a few other little things, most of them
matters of fact and knowledge, silly things sometimes, like the names of
the states and their capitals, and the length of the Nile and the Amazon,
and the author of Gray's ``Elegy.''



Those few things that we do seem to have asked of public education are
remarkably possible to teach. It is faddish nonsense to say that we don't
know how, for instance, to teach reading and writing to the ignorant and
must spend lots of money on studies and experiments before we can begin.
All children are ignorant. All children who have ever learned to read and
write have begun that task in ignorance. We know how to teach reading and
writing --- it's been done successfully millions and millions of times.
It does require exactitude and discipline, and somewhat more of those things
in the teacher than in the learners. It requires drill and recitation and
memorization and practice, but these things can be made to happen. In one
way, it is easy to teach reading and writing and arithmetic because it's
possible to achieve concrete and measurable results through regular and
practicable methods. In that respect, it is very difficult to teach the
brotherhood of all mankind because we don't know exactly what that is or
how we would measure it In another way, however, it's much harder to teach
reading and writing and arithmetic because we do have to know those things
if we are to teach them, and we do have to be continuously rigorous and
exact. To teach the brotherhood of mankind seems to be mostly the presentation
of attractive but untestable assertions and the reiteration of pious slogans
and generalizations. If you'd like to be a teacher, but you don't want to
work too hard, by all means set up as a teacher of the brotherhood of mankind
rather than as a teacher of reading and writing and arithmetic. Such a career
has the further advantage that no one knows how to decide whether you have
actually taught anyone anything, whereas teachers of reading and writing
and arithmetic are always being embarrassed when their students are shown
not to have learned those things.



It takes a very simple fellow not to be a little suspicious when he notices
that all this teaching of ``values'' and ``attitudes'' seems
to be at once much easier and more profitable than teaching things like
the chief exports of New Zealand or the trade routes of the ancient Greeks,
to say nothing of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Even an idiot will grow
suspicious should he behold all of the implications of the values-teaching
business. The profits are indeed enormous. You can't just go and teach values.
You have to study {\bfseries how}  to teach values. You need money, and time,
and questionnaires, and duplicating machines to duplicate the questionnaires,
and keypunch operators to tabulate the replies to the questionnaires, and
computer time to collate the data punched by the keypunch operators, and
probably a new Mr. Coffee machine so that everybody can take a break once
in a while. You need to figure out how to teach both the values themselves
and the art of values-teaching to those who are eager to become values teachers.
You need to devise the strategies by which values teachers can be sold to
the schools in the disguises of social studies teachers and language arts
teachers.



Here is how values-teaching works in the classroom. This is what they
call a ``values clarification strategy'' --- later on we'll have
a sensitivity module. This values clarification strategy is suggested for
use with students of all ages, and, as you'll see, it is equally relevant
to the subject matter of any course taught in any school in America, which
is to say, not at all.



The teacher writes two words --- one at either end of the blackboard.
``Cadillac'' and ``Volkswagen'' are recommended; the first
probably ought to go on the {\bfseries right}  end of the blackboard, thus suggesting,
even in a home economics course, something useful about the eternal verities
of politics and money. Having written ``Cadillac'' and ``Volkswagen''
in the neat block capitals that are actually{\bfseries  taught}  in education
courses, the teacher asks the student which of those brands they ``identify
with'' and to get up and move to the corresponding side of the room.
After some puzzled looks and shrugs, and one smart aleck in the back of
the room drawing circles around his temple, and lots of milling and shuffling,
the students end up standing in bunches on either side of the room, wondering
what the hell can happen next. It's worse than they imagine, for the teacher
now instructs them to choose partners of their own persuasion and to hold
a serious discussion of the values that have sent them into the one camp
or the other. The serious discussion is to last for two minutes. Then they
all go back to their places and watch for the next pair of words.



Now you can imagine how they feel. It's like finding yourself at a party
where a bubble-brained hostess wants everybody to play Truth or Consequences
or else! Of course, even in the worst of our schools, there are no students
as stupid as the teacher who would do such a thing, so they probably manage
to find something less inane to talk about for those two minutes, giving
thanks the while that at least it beats the Congress of Vienna or the square
of the hypotenuse. Furthermore, if they shuffle back to their seats as slowly
as possible, the bell might ring before they have to choose between a rose
and a daisy or between an electric typewriter and a quill pen. Unlike the
teacher, they know that anyone who ``identifies'' with an electric
typewriter is crazy, just about as crazy as anyone who ``identifies''
with a quill pen.



Take a few moments wondering what it means ``to identify'' with
a Cadillac. Only one thing is clear: the man who identifies with a Cadillac
probably does not imagine that he is a Cadillac. Everything else is vague.
It could be any or several of these: he wants a Cadillac; he admires a Cadillac;
he deserves a Cadillac; he needs a Cadillac\ldots add some more for yourself.
The list will probably be very long and very boring. Without such a list
of possibilities, however, the little game of values clarification would
be impossible. The students and the teacher can play it only because they
{\bfseries don't}  know what they mean by ``identifying with'' something.
Nor is it the point of the game to {\bfseries define}  that term. The game is
simply a self-indulgent wallowing in ignorance with only one clear result:
It takes up some time that might have been spent in studying something concrete
and useful but admittedly more difficult.



Grammar, for instance. Notice that such a futile exercise is made possible,
and even made futile, because a transitive verb, ``identify,'' has
been twisted into an intransitive form. It is {\bfseries not}  a ``rule''
of English grammar that some verbs must have objects. It is simply the {\bfseries fact} 
that some verbs evoke relationships that don't make any sense without an
object. When someone asks you ``How do we see?'' you understand
him well enough to answer, although the answer may be either a neurological
disquisition or ``through a glass, darkly.'' When he asks you ``How
do we view?'' you need more information if you are to answer him, because
the idea evoked by the word ``view'' is not complete in itself.
This, like so many things that we think of as arbitrary rules, is actually
a clue to how the mind works in English. The ``identify with'' values
clarification game assures that, for a while at least, no mind will work.



Things like that really do happen in our schools. Although it may not
seem so at first, it is just that sort of thing that causes the corruption
of language that, in its turn, causes just that sort of thing. In fact,
it is only the preachers and practitioners of such nonsense who take it
seriously. Imagine for the moment that the students could be persuaded to
take it seriously. There you are --- remember, this is suitable for all
ages --- standing on your side of the room. You {\bfseries do}  choose a partner,
let's say, and you settle down to the serious business of discussing, for
two minutes, the tremendous values and heartfelt convictions that have led
you to identify with ``Cadillac.'' What do you say? What {\bfseries can} 
you say? No matter how seriously you take it, can you do much more than
recite a slogan or two, put forth some well-known generalization, enunciate
some vague impression or casual opinion? And your partner, obviously not
in need of conviction, can do only the same. So there you stand, muttering
desultorily about resale value and roominess and pointing out that a careful
driver can save gasoline by not accelerating too fast. Great. Should you
find yourself in such a predicament, of course, you {\bfseries won't}  take it
seriously. Like any right-thinking human being, you will pick the best-looking
partner you can reach and spend those two minutes arranging something for
later. Now {\bfseries that}  might clarify some values. Vaporizing about Cadillacs
can only air some prejudices, and not even strong ones at that.



Consider now what happens to language in an exercise like that. Are quill
pens and electric typewriters values? To prize one, must we despise the
other? Should we be doing any of this stuff at all in a school, where we
are supposed to learn some arithmetic and the intelligent use of language?
If a student is to take any learning at all from such an exercise, leaving
aside the revelation that his teacher is a nitwit, it is that what we say
doesn't much matter. Idle rapping is called the clarification of values.
Any old thing at all, anything a teacher can {\bfseries name}, becomes a value.
Unreal polarities are suggested by the pairings of such ``values,''
and students are given to understand that through discourse they have discovered
that ``value'' in them that has led them to one pole or the other.
This little game will hardly suggest to any student that a ``clarification
of values'' must, if it is to take place at all, proceed through discursive
statements and logical analysis. It leaves the impression that vague opinions
and the suggestions of environment are ``clarifications.'' Students
usually {\bfseries do}  learn something in class, but it's seldom what the teacher
had in mind. In this class, the students will learn to be content with empty
talk and to accept random reflection as though it were knowledge.



This ``values clarification'' business is very popular in the
schools, and an educationist named Simon has written, with a couple of pals,
a nifty handbook chock-full of ``values clarification strategies.''
The examples mentioned are not, as you probably thought, silly exaggerations
--- they're from the book. A wily teacher could spend a whole year playing
those fun games in class and still have enough examples left over for summer
session. They are all designed not only to stay as far as possible from
hypotenuses but to reduce the power of language in the players. They achieve
that result by offering the students experiences rather than study and feelings
rather than knowledge. The experiences and feelings, however, exist as words
only. It is hard to imagine the student suggestible and feebleminded enough
to think that he does, in fact, feel more empathy for Arabs after eating
a sheep's eye.



Eating a sheep's eye, of course, is not a values clarification strategy.
It is what Simon would call a ``sensitivity module,'' and here is
a more likely example:


\begin{quote}

  
In teaching elementary children about the early world explorers, one
  teacher had her children go out and actually ``discover'' new parts
  of the city. One instruction was to ``find a new and faster route to
  the ball field.'' The gap between the world of Columbus and their own
  world in the city was narrowed.

\end{quote}



By ``elementary children'' he means, probably, children in elementary
school, unless, perhaps, he thinks that ``elementary'' means something
like ``simple-minded.'' It would take a simple-minded child, indeed,
to get sucked in to a silly project like this. And what makes the project
silly is also what brought it to pass in the first place --- bad language.



People who can use language accurately can make useful analogies and
learn to understand things. They can also tell --- through language, for
there is no other way just how far an analogy can be pushed before it becomes
useless. That ``sensitivity module'' is drawn from a silly analogy,
which suggests that what Columbus did is comparable to finding a better
way to get to the ball field. To make such an analogy requires both ignorance
and misunderstanding of history. That's not ``discovery,'' and even
Simon feels uncertain enough about it to put those quotation marks around
the word. In fact, the search for some hitherto unimagined route to the
ball field is so absurd on the face of it that the students who undertook
it must surely have spent their time in the nearest snack bar. A teacher
silly enough to give such an assignment has to be humored, of course, so
the students must have spent a few minutes concocting a good story, maybe
something about monsters and the edge of the known world.



Notice that this exercise is called a ``sensitivity module.''
Such is the power of language that nonsensical time wasters like this become
significant educational processes when given the right name, and money is
spent to design them. In what sense this can be called a ``module,''
there is no understanding. If this is a ``module,'' then lunch might
just as well be called a ``module.'' In fact, lunch is a ``module''
in many schools. just as in Dallas, buses are ``motorized attendance
modules.'' A module, therefore, is anything you please. There's no profit
in worrying about the module, however; it's the ``sensitivity''
part that's important.



Schools arc in favor of sensitivity and opposed, naturally, to insensitivity.
In the traditional curriculum there are still some outdated things that
cause insensitivity. Historical dates cause insensitivity. The square of
the hypotenuse instills callousness. Untempered grammar and spelling produce
ruthless elitism. The multiplication table can engender inhumanity, and
precise diction has been known to result in fascism. Since we have not yet
managed to persuade the public that such studies should be discontinued
utterly, the best we can do is mitigate them, wherever possible, with expeditions
into the mists of what is called noncognitive learning. If we make children
learn mere facts about the difficulties of navigation in the fifteenth century,
they may well grow up to be cutthroats and boors, totally lacking in sensitivity.
Far better it is to send them wandering the streets of the city and pretending
to search for {\itshape terra incognita.} That way, you see, they'll get the
``feel'' of exploration. Well, let's say that they can at least
pretend to get the feel. When they get back, they won't know any dehumanizing
things about the nasty economic implications of exploration in the Renaissance
or those silly and irrelevant political struggles of fifteenth-century Europe,
but they will have ``narrowed the gap'' between themselves and Columbus.



And what can that mean --- to narrow the gap between us and Columbus?
Those things that separate us from Columbus --- can they be taken all
together and understood as a ``gap''? If so, in what way, {\bfseries exactly},
is the gap ``narrowed'' when we find a quicker way to get to the
ball field? When we eat blubber, do we narrow the gap between us and the
Eskimos? When we walk around blindfolded for an hour, do we narrow the gap
between us and the blind? They do things like this in school --- not just
in the public schools but even and especially in the schools that produce
the teachers for the public schools. All such ``gaps'' are very
large and complex, and to understand them and to have knowledge about them
will require that we first make many statements of fact. To ``feel''
like an Eskimo and to know what being an Eskimo involves are utterly different
things. The former is probably impossible for non-Eskimos. The latter can
be achieved by anyone who will attend to statements of fact. Ten thousand
sensitivity modules will not teach us how it is with men who sail into the
utterly unknown; to read their words just may give us an inkling.



People who worry about teaching sensitivity have little use for exactitude
in statements of fact. The vagueness of narrowing gaps and identifying with
Volkswagens seems to them somehow ``humanistic,'' and precise statements
of fact and matters of knowledge seem the opposite of ``humanistic,''
whatever that might be. This attitude can survive and flourish only where
language is diffuse and imprecise. The accurate statement of empirical propositions
would destroy it.



It is possible, of course, to clarify values. Whether that is the proper
business of the schools is another matter, but it surely can be done. It
can be done, however, only through language, only through a chain of logical
discourse. Logical discourse requires exactitude. If we {\bfseries do}  want to
teach morality or at least the thoughtful examination of our deeds and their
apparent meanings, we can do this only through teaching exactitude. It is
no accident that thought, word, and deed keep company together in prayer
books. To clarify our values must mean to make fine distinctions. To make
fine distinctions means to see how different things are similar and how
similar things are different. This calls for many finely tuned words and
subtle grammatical devices and the ability to put them all together with
precision. The finer the distinctions we can make in words and, therefore,
in our thoughts, the finer the judgments we can make about the nature of
our deeds. Contrariwise, careless and blunted words conceal the nature of
our deeds.



I had read --- and I believe it --- that the Nazi bureaucracy generated
thousands and thousands of pages of routine paperwork related to the business
of killing Jews, but in all that paperwork the word ``killing''
appears nowhere. Those who think that a concern for precision in language
is finicky and pedantic should ponder that for a while. The people who say
to each other ``Let's kill the Jews'' have indubitably clarified
their values. Having done so, they may find them repellent and decide to
seek others, but I wouldn't count on it. The people who say that a sensitivity
module will narrow the gap between us and Columbus have not clarified their
values or anything else. If our values happen to be abhorrent, as they often
are, we can know that only through stating them plainly. It's not impossible
that thousands of Germans could have done what they did only because they
spoke carefully of ``transportation'' and ``resettlement''
and ``solution'' rather than of ``killing.''



It is not only possible to clarify values but obviously desirable. It
is also possible, and desirable, to balance budgets. To teach people how
to balance budgets, it just isn't enough to let them play with fat wads
of Monopoly money. We have to teach them arithmetic. To teach them how to
clarify values, we must teach them mastery of the system with which we express
values and the only device we have for ``knowing'' them. That's
language.



The values of ``values clarification'' stand in need of some
clarification. To{\bfseries  see}  that requires enough skill in language to recognize
the abuse of language. To do it requires even more. It would help, too,
to remember the words of Hobbes: ``For words are wise men's counters,
they do but reckon with them; but they are the money of fools that value
them\ldots by authority.'' ``Clarification'' is a word. When a
teacher in his authority tells his students that they will now clarify their
values by rapping about Cadillacs and Volkswagens, what are the poor kids
to do? They have not been taught the skills of language, and they have no
choice but to believe or to pretend that they believe. In either case, they
must grow up believing that the clarification of values is a silly game
played in dreary places by preposterous people to no useful end. They become
a herd and live, perforce, the unexamined life.



There is more clarification of values in a single sentence of Bacon than
in all the strategies of Simon. Consider the rest of that line: ``Reading
maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.''
We have read that line so often, of course, that we seldom do more than
nod at it. When we give it some thought, we can discover (and this time
the ``discovery'' is real) the power of that mind and the power
of language in the meticulous choice of the words ``full,'' ``ready,''
and ``exact.'' That's exact language and the expression of an exact
thought. The words tell us not only that a well-read man is ``full''
but that an ill-read man is ``empty,'' as empty as the student whose
study of Columbus took him to the ball field. They tell us that the man
who cannot ``confer,'' who is not fluent and practiced in his speech,
is uncertain and inept, like the student just returned from the ball field
and needing desperately to convince his teacher that his sensitivity has
been heightened --- really! They tell us that the man who cannot ``write''
is imprecise and unclear in his mind, like Simon, who tells us that the
Columbus gap has been narrowed through a sensitivity module.



There is no need, of course, to ferret out the fact that the schools
are in the business of teaching ``values'' at the expense of reading,
writing, and ciphering. They boast of it publicly. Here are the words of
a professor of educational psychology explaining to the public why they
ought to accept with equanimity the fact that students do so poorly on tests
of reading, writing, and ciphering. Those tests, you must understand,


\begin{quote}

  
do not attempt to quantify such crucial concerns as students' self-perception;
  their attitude toward, and relationship with, people whose culture and
  social class differ from their own; their ethical behavior, values, personal
  philosophy and moral commitments; their creativity, emotional health and
  sense of ethnic identity --- precisely the areas that schools have been
  emphasizing.

\end{quote}



So. We have traded skill in language and number for ethical behavior,
personal philosophy, moral commitment, creativity, and emotional health.
Not at all a bad deal. But wait. What has become of those millions of young
people deeply schooled in morality? These are the ``areas'' the
schools have been ``emphasizing'' for decades now. How is it that
Earth is not yet fair and all men glad and wise? How is it that creativity
and emotional health lead to the beating of teachers and the destruction
of file cabinets? What personal philosophy calls forth the smashing of toilet
bowls with sledgehammers?



Children are much smarter than we think. They know when they are being
deceived and defrauded. Unless they can utter what they know, however, they
know it only in part and imperfectly. If we do not give them the language
and thought in which they might genuinely clarify some values, they will
do their clarifying with sledgehammers. None of the lofty goals named above
can be approached without the skillful practice of language and thought,
and to ``emphasize'' those ``areas'' in the absence of that
practice is to promulgate thought control rather than the control of thought.



\chapter{The Pill}



Thought control, like birth control, is best undertaken as long as possible
before the fact. Many grown-ups will obstinately persist, if only now and
then, in composing small strings of sentences in their heads and achieving
at least a momentary logic. This probably cannot be prevented, but we have
learned how to minimize its consequences by arranging that such grown-ups
will be unable to pursue that logic very far. If they were at home in the
technology of writing, there's no telling how much social disorder they
would cause by thinking things out at length.



Our schools have chosen to cut this danger off as close to the root as
possible, thus taking measures to preclude not only the birth of thought
but its conception. They give the pill to even the youngest children, but,
just to be on the safe side, they give it to everybody else, too, especially
all would-be schoolteachers.



Now find a comfortable position and read this miniature museum of contemporary
American writing. These little essays were produced by college graduates
applying for jobs as schoolteachers. The applicants may not have those jobs
yet, but they do have certificates that attest to their competence and assure
us that they have satisfied stringent requirements.


\begin{quote}

  
A. The use of behavioral objectives in a classroom are good because
  they help the teacher to see a more clear path for her/his teaching. He/she
  is able to predetermine what he/she will teach and hopefully at the end
  of that session the students will have learned what was outlined for them.
  Behavioral objectives can help the teacher evaluate her/his teaching by
  looking at them to see what has been accomplished in class. So many times,
  a teacher can get off of a subject and not realize the students are not
  learning the material they were designated to learn. If the students are
  aware of what they are to learn then they can make a greater effort to
  learn the information. The teacher may use the objectives as a form of
  evaluation for the students so that she/he may see how far they have progressed
  and whether or not the topic should be reviewed or more information can
  be added. Behavioral objectives are an overall good idea to help students
  and teachers see what direction the learning should be going in and how
  progress is being made.

  
B. In the process of teaching science to students there will be preassessment
  test to determine what the student already knows. From the finding of the
  preassessment test objectives, teacher and students will be designed. Concepts
  to be taught will be listed. If the subject area being covered is weather,
  than the different aspects of weather will be introduced. There will be
  worksheets and experiment to prove and evaluate the objectives for the
  activity. The activity children will be given activities that they will
  have to do on their own example collecting date of the formation of clouds
  and what weather usually follow certain cloud formation. The project must
  be flexable so that it meets the need of each child and is meaningful for
  them.

  
C. If I had a self-contained classroom with various children on different
  level, I would try to group them according to their abilities when working
  on certain subject matters. I would use behavior modification in my classroom
  in order to motivate the children. If we were working on math for example
  --- If we were playing the bingo game (a game to help them recognize
  numbers) I would reward one person with a reward for bingoing if they could
  call out their numbers to ne or if they couldn't remember a number I could
  help them and still they would bingo. I worked with some children in this
  and it really motivated them to learn because of the reward.

  
D. start with basic ways of setting \& bumping the ball \& controlling
  it --- use drills of how many times before missing \& others. set
  \& bump ball against the wall---how to bump \& set ball properly.
  demonstrate

  
start with different types of serves, find the one that suits them best
  \& stick with it. keep eye on ball --- Then start serving over the
  net. After that start placing the ball (determining where it's going to
  go. demonstrate so they'll know what I mean

  
start the spikers for taller individuals to spiking \& setters in
  to setting ball close to net. Use fun games through out to keep them interested.
  demonstrate spiking

  
Cover the rules and go into game situation. Teach them how to dig for
  the ball \& how to fall \& avoid being injured.

  
Devide into equal teams \& play games of volleyball best 2 out of
  3. Use a tournament type play so that all teams will get a chance to play
  each other \& if they're pretty equally matched it will result in some
  very close \& exciting games

  
Cover any questions the students might have \& give them a handout
  of material that would be covered on a test. handout will include the things
  not to do \& how to do them right.

\end{quote}



That's what happens when you've spent four years popping little pills
of jargon. Try to put down that nasty suspicion. It's just too much of a
coincidence that all four of these teachers could have taken jobs in your
local school system. One, maybe. Perhaps, just perhaps, even two. But all
four? Impossible! Rest easy.



All of these passages are curious but instructive mixtures of ineptitude
and technicality. Writer A, for instance, tells us that the use of behavioral
objectives are good, revealing at one stroke a subtle knowledge of pedagogical
theory and an inability to match subjects and verbs. The same writer shows
an admirable abhorrence of sexism in all those slashed forms, even going
so far as to give precedence now to one gender and now the other, but she/he
seems confused about prepositions. The importance of this passage, however,
is not to be found in such trivia.



Writer A may be confused about the rudiments of English, but he/she-she/he
has clearly heard and practiced some jargon. This little essay is built
on the assertion that there are such things as behavioral objectives and
that they are ``an overall good idea.'' If you've never before heard
the term ``behavioral objectives,'' count yourself lucky, but you
certainly won't be mystified. Obviously, if we want someone to do something,
that must be a ``behavioral objective.'' In schools, adding up a
column of figures is thought of as ``a behavior,'' and getting students
to do that is a behavioral objective. It's important to notice that adding
them up wrong is, of course, also ``a behavior,'' so that to teach
children to add correctly becomes a matter of ``behavior modification,''
but more of that later. There are lots of things that A didn't learn in
college; some of them we can see, and from them we can infer many others.
She/he-he/she {\bfseries did}, however, learn a kind of vocabulary of special
terms, each of which is used to conceal an emptiness of meaning and to make
the obvious sound important. To what things or events in the world of experience
does the term ``behavioral objective'' point? They are countless.
If we persuade five-year-olds to latch their galoshes or convince a whole
nation to convert its schools into gambling casinos, we have accomplished
a behavioral objective. Should we fail, we have nevertheless promulgated
behavioral objectives. In the language of the school people, an alarm clock
would be called a mode of behavioral objective implementation, but so would
a Christmas bonus or a thumbscrew. A term that means almost anything means
almost nothing. Such a term is a convenient device for those who have almost
nothing to say. We have to conclude that A heard about ``behavioral
objectives'' very often in the teacher school --- and somewhat less
often about clear, precise writing and thinking.



Writer B cannot spell ``flexible'' or even ``then'' but
has no trouble with ``preassessment,'' a tricky word with lots of
s's. He cannot, however, make any sense of the word. Who could? ``Preassessment''
is something that can only happen before we have done any assessment, and
we can preassess something just about as easily as we can pre-eat our breakfasts.
The test referred to in B's first sentence might imaginably be called, if
you must call it something fancier than just a test, a ``pre-teaching''
test. In contempt of sense, the ``pre-ness'' has been transferred
to the assessing because it creates such a handsome word. The same principle,
by the way, was at work in A, who promised to ``predetermine what he/she
will teach.'' You either determine something or you don't. Our language
permits us to {\bfseries say}  things like ``predetermine,'' or even ``undetermine,''
and ``subdetermine,'' but it doesn't let us mean anything by them.



Words like ``preassessment'' are paradoxical. They evoke an imagined
world in which there is no sense or logic. To tolerate such words requires
dullness of mind; to embrace them, lunacy. Most jargon, however, is something
less extreme. We can see its normal attributes in B's use of the word ``aspects'';
``the different aspects of weather will be introduced.''



Can't you just hear teacher B in class? ``Dear children, I will now
introduce an aspect of weather.'' What does he {\bfseries do}  then? What
{\bfseries is}  an aspect of weather? What idea of the meaning of ``weather''
must we have if we are to separate it into its ``aspects''? Is an
aspect of weather a kind of weather --- rainy, sunny? Is it a particular
event like a hurricane? Is it an attribute of weather? Nice weather for
ducks, for instance? Leaving weather aside entirely, what {\bfseries exactly} 
is an aspect? Is ``aspect,'' as so many seem to think, just another
way of saying ``phase'' and ``factor''? Is phase, perhaps,
just one of the factors of an aspect? Can we divide just {\bfseries anything} 
up into aspects or only certain kinds of things?



And, by the way, presuming against all odds that B does know what he
means by ``aspect,'' just what is involved in ``introducing''
it? To introduce an aspect, do you name it, or describe it? Do you, perhaps,
as the word in fact suggests, stick it in? If ``rain'' is an aspect
of weather, and that's probably what the poor fellow means, how do you go
about ``introducing'' rain? And, for heaven's sake, why?



Writer C introduces --- sticks in, that is --- something called ``behavior
modification,'' an ominous aspect, no doubt, of the consequences of
the preassessment of behavioral objectives. Teachers still put up with being
called teachers, but they seem reluctant to admit that humble teaching is
what they do. They prefer to modify behavior. Take a moment to go back and
read again what C has written. Could you rest quietly, in the still watches
of the night, knowing that C has been unleashed to modify the behavior of
your children?



Aside from the obvious, which is far too comprehensive to have much meaning
at all, what could ``behavior modification'' possibly mean? C says
that he/she would ``use'' it to ``motivate'' the students.
Is there some difference between behavior modification and the {\bfseries use} 
of behavior modification, as there is a difference between a hammer and
hammering? If so, how is the {\bfseries use}  of behavior modification to be distinguished
from the act of modifying behavior any more than the use of a hammer is
to be distinguished from a hammering? Isn't ``motivating'' itself
a kind of behavior modification; and doesn't that sentence say that C will
use behavior modification in order to modify behavior?



What it means is that C had come out of teacher school with his/her-her/his
head full of empty terms. There is no doubt that C would also spell ``preassessment''
correctly, although she/he-he/she has a little problem with sentence structure.



There's no point in commenting in any detail on the words of D. It is
worth remembering, however, that D is also a college graduate and a certified
teacher. What's interesting is his touching faith in the ``handout of
material,'' a handout that will include, you will recall, ``the
things not to do \& how to do them right.''



Handouts of material are big business in Education. A typical class in
Education starts with a handout of material, which handout provides nifty
terms like ``preassessment test'' and ``behavior modification.''
Then the class breaks up into small groups so that the students can rap
and reach for themselves the conclusion that behavioral objectives are ``an
overall good idea.'' After four years of this, every graduating student
walks into the world clutching thick sheaves of handouts of materials made
up almost entirely of words and phrases that have little or nothing to do
with real things or people or events in the world of experience.



\chapter{A Handout of Material}



Jargon is a handout of material designed to prevent the need for thought.
Consider the infamous ``input.'' For certain technicians, this word
has a concrete meaning and points to something that can be pointed to with
no other word. For sales managers, deans, politicians, and most of the rest
of us, ``input'' provides an ornamental cover for a hole in the
brain. When a vice president for administration asks for your input, what
{\bfseries exactly}  does he want? Does he want your opinion? Your advice? Your
hypothesis? Your knowledge? Your hunch? Your money? What? Does he know?
If he wants to know how many long distance calls you've made this month,
why does that get called ``input,'' the same term he would use in
asking for your height, weight, and blood type? Does ``input'' describe
adequately {\bfseries anything}  you might send someone?



Again, a word that means almost anything means almost nothing. The man
who asks for your ``input'' is not put to the trouble of understanding
what he wants. Furthermore, sometimes even bureaucrats and administrators
seem to be able to tell you what it is they actually do want. You get a
letter from the district manager asking for your hat size. He is making
a study that will discover whether skull capacity is related to monthly
sales figures. Simple enough. But suddenly your hat size becomes input.
This isn't so bad; that number may in fact become part of what might technically
be called ``input.'' In his next letter, however, the same district
manager asks if you think it's worth the trouble to keep the company bowling
league going for another year. And that becomes input. The word no longer
makes any useful distinction.



Every craft has its technical lexicon, and the terms often make useful
and necessary distinctions between one thing and all other things, sometimes
exceedingly fine distinctions. The more technically demanding the craft,
the more it needs an extensive and precise, technical lexicon. Contrariwise,
crafts that make only small demands on the technical skills of their practitioners
require only a small list of technical words and might even get by with
none at all. The practice of some crafts, and schoolteaching seems to be
one such, requires very little that could be called an organized technology.
Such crafts ought not, therefore, to require much of a technical lexicon
at all, but, strangely enough, it is often in just such crafts that we find
the most elaborate jargon.



In our culture, technology commands admiration and respect. We love the
nuclear physicists and the brain surgeons. We want to be like them when
we grow up. Failing that, we'd like to be at least as technological as possible.
One might imaginably draw a chart to rank our various callings in terms
of their technological demands so that we could know whether to grant more
respect to the systems analyst than to the forensic pathologist, but it
isn't really necessary. We can always tell which of two crafts outranks
the other by looking at its lexicon. Jargon runs only downhill. You will
notice that although the educators have borrowed ``input'' from the computer
people, the computer people have felt no need to borrow ``behavioral
objectives,'' or ``preassessment'' from the educators. It is
a general principle that when A apes B it is because A thinks that B is
better than A, although in the case of teenagers the opposite is true. Accordingly,
we can conclude that educators and businessmen look up to military strategists,
from whom they have borrowed ``thrust,'' and to physicists and mathematicians,
from whom they have borrowed ``interface.''



We like to think, or at least we like others to think, that what we do
is important and difficult and that we achieve it only out of skill and
intelligence. Since very few of our callings actually require much more
skill and intelligence than the banging of trees with stones, we seize gratefully
any opportunity to {\bfseries sound}  as though we were skillful and intelligent.
Fortunately, such opportunities are frequent. All we have to do is listen
to the people who really are, we think, skillful and intelligent. Consider
the following remarks taken from an address to a faculty senate. The remarker
is, or was, a provost, whatever that is. The title itself, of course, is
another admission that academic administrators wish they had the skill and
intelligence, to say nothing of the power, of highranking military officers.



This provost says: ``\ldots we are currently in a holding pattern
as far as long-range planning is concerned.'' Now this shows us that
provosts know in their hearts that air traffic controllers are more valuable
and effective than provosts. It's true, of course, but the provost probably
wouldn't want to assert it publicly. He speaks also of ``a number of
unanswered, unresolved issues which\ldots provide a prelude to the onset
of the process itself.'' This is more subtle. A prelude to the onset.
Neither of these words is specifically the jargon of a craft although ``prelude''
is vaguely musical and ``onset'' vaguely medical. Both sound quite
concrete and specific, the words, as it were, of a man who knows what he's
talking about. But the two of them together add up to an absurdity similar
to ``preassessment.'' The flavor is good, though; there's the whiff
of aesthetic sensitivity in ``prelude'' and the hint of keen diagnostic
power in ``onset.'' Musicians and physicians clearly outrank provosts.



So do mathematicians. The provost gives them their homage in terms like
``planning matrices'' and ``planning parameters.'' Hardly
anyone who uses these words has any idea what they mean. It doesn't matter.
``Parameters,'' except when used by those who do know what they
are, is a useful omnibus word like ``aspect,'' except that it's
usually intended to point vaguely in the direction of some of the more remote
aspects of something or other. ``Matrix'' is very popular these
days. Polysyllables that end in x have hypnotic power over the English-speaking
mind. Strangely, that power is actually increased when the exotic x disappears
into an unlikely plural. People who can utter tricky plurals like ``matrices''
and ``indices'' (even trickier because of the disappearing {\bfseries e} )
must be very learned indeed.



So far, we can see from the provost's jargon that he feels inferior to
air traffic controllers, musicians, physicians, mathematicians, and, perhaps,
type founders and other craftsmen for whom a matrix is in simple fact a
matrix. It is hardly surprising, since all those crafts are indeed more
demanding than the craft of the provost. What is surprising, though, is
that the provost also speaks of ``variables which must be cranked into
the decision model'' and recognizes the need ``to crank this kind
of adjustment factor into the decision model'' and even ``to crank
in some quality measures which speak to the level of teaching excellence.''
Whether out of inordinate modesty or ardent republicanism, the provost makes
it clear that he stands in awe even of the technology of sausage manufacture.
A handsome admission.



When there is no idea in the mind, a word rushes into the vacuum. This
provost, for instance, speaks of the ``need to recognize that there
are a number of components in the process.'' ``Components''
is good, because it raises the provost, momentarily, to the rank of highly
skilled professionals like the people who assemble Bearcat scanners, but
the utterance is nevertheless disappointing. For one thing, almost anyone
could have said it of almost anything. It's not likely to show up in future
editions of {\itshape Bartlett's Quotations.} It reveals neither thought nor
knowledge.



Imagine that you are chatting with Marco Polo, just back from Cathay,
and you're burning to hear all about those strange people in a distant land.
You ask what wonderful things he saw there; he tells you ``marvels.''
You ask what the people wear; he tells you ``attire.'' What do they
grow; ``crops.'' And their processes; what are they made of? ``Components.''
Now you know all about Cathay.



When you divide a ``process'' into its parts, do you get ``components''?
Those who speak of components in a technical sense would probably say no.
Components are generally discrete parts related to one another by the way
they work in a system. The ``parts'' of a {\bfseries process}  might well
have less distinct boundaries, and they are related to one another in a
temporal or sequential fashion. A process takes place (sometimes) in a transmission,
but the machinery is not the process. Well, couldn't we understand the ``components
of a process'' as a metaphor? After all, we know what he means. We probably
could, except that just a few sentences later he speaks of the same things
as the ``elements'' of a process. While we're still trying to figure
that out, he goes on to tell us about the ``factors'' of the same
process.



Little wonder we're in a holding pattern circling above the prelude to
the onset of this process. This is one hell of a process! Some of its constituents
are components, some elements, and some factors. However, we know that that
is not the case. Those are not designations of the different {\bfseries kinds} 
of constituents; they are simply jargon terms that point to nothing in particular,
and, therefore, to just about anything you please to imagine. So, come to
think of it, {\bfseries do}  we know what he means? If he calls the constituents
of this process, apparently at whim, components, elements, and factors,
mightn't he just as well call them aspects, facets, and phases? Are all
those words interchangeable for him? Probably. That means that he doesn't
know what he means. If the process in question is at all complicated, this
is probably not the man we want to set it going. He doesn't understand it,
and he doesn't know how to go about understanding it. His jargon conceals,
from him, but not from us, the deep, empty hole in his mind. He uses technological
language as a substitute for technique.



The propensity for borrowed jargon is always a mark of limited ability
in the technique of discursive thought. It comes from a poor education.
A poor education is not simply a matter of thinking that components and
elements might just as well be called factors; it is the inability to manipulate
that elaborate symbol system that permits us to make fine distinctions among
such things. It is through making just such distinctions that we understand
the world, insofar as we {\bfseries do}  understand it. It is, furthermore, through
the ability to make such distinctions that we {\bfseries devise}  the world after
having evoked its possibilities in language. The man who cannot make such
distinctions is not merely a fool, he is a dangerous fool. Should we put
him in charge of {\bfseries any}  of our processes, or even in charge of the preludes
to their onsets, he will botch the work. If we're lucky his botch won't
kill us or cause World War III, but then again we may not be that lucky.



That provost has been given not an education but a handout of material.
His rudimentary language evokes, as language always does, an unseen world,
but it is a cloudy and uncertain one. If he were running a hot-dog stand
on the corner, that wouldn't be so bad, but he is a high-ranking officer
of what we call an educational institution. In that position, he pretends
to have knowledge and technique. If we don't listen to him carefully, he
may well fool us into believing that he does have those things, and we will
suffer him to devise for others the same kind of education that has made
him what he is. Succeeding generations will see the geometrical multiplication
of people whose thinking ability is such that they will nod wisely at the
mention of a prelude to the onset of a process consisting of components,
elements, and factors. When we have enough of these people, the lunatics
will take over the management of the asylum.



They may have already done so. Do you suppose that that provost is the
only high-ranking academic official in America whose thinking is clouded
by bad language? Anyone who snoops around in the academic world can assure
you that he is typical of the people who make important policy in all our
schools. It is perfectly true that many of the worst of the jargon-mongers
seem to be remote from the schools --- sociologists and psychologists
and bureaucrats and businessmen of all kinds, for instance. Nevertheless,
they all come from the schools. In every measurable way, education is the
largest of our social institutions; hardly a single citizen escapes its
influence. The propensity for jargon and bad language is a sickness not
of this or that calling but of thought itself. The main business of education
is to teach the process of thought and the operation of the symbol systems
in which we think --- language and number. When education fails to teach
thinking, it fails in everything, and everybody talks nonsense. Since the
schools infect everybody, it is not possible to discover a calling whose
effectiveness has not been diminished by the sickness of thought and language
that are spread in the schools.



Here, for instance, are the words of a forester, a healthy, red-blooded
American who loves, no doubt, the woods and streams and the brisk smell
of the balsam. He is describing a part of his work, the selection of attractive
campsites:


\begin{quote}

  
The method is based evaluating two basic groupings the authors [he's
  working with an accomplice] feel are vital in considering where campgrounds
  might best be located. Those groupings, physical and socioeconomic, are
  broken down into sub-headings which in turn are expanded into lists of
  sub-variables. The idea was to have trained observers visit pre-determined
  potential campsites and rate them according to a set numerical rating system,
  supposedly reflecting degree of campground excellence. Priorities in campsite
  development were the product of the socioeconomic data. When the two ratings
  were combined a list of prioritized campgrounds and their existing physical
  status would result, and hopefully provide the planner with a feeling of
  confidence as the next step was taken.

\end{quote}



Try to ignore the small errors in grammar and spelling and the awkwardness
of the prose. Remember Natty Bumppo, who spoke wisdom even though his subjects
and verbs didn't always agree. We have to allow woodsmen a little latitude.
Ask yourself rather just what, exactly, is this woodsman up to when he breaks
physical and socioeconomic groupings down into subheadings and then expands
those subheadings into lists of subvariables. Ask also what it means to
call the groupings ``vital'' and how we could possibly expect anyone
to visit some unpredetermined potential campsite. Forget your uneasiness
about ``hopefully'' --- it doesn't matter --- but ask what is
meant by the ``existing physical status'' of a campground and how
it could possibly ``result.'' Then ask where and how this doughty
woodsman came to suffer such brain damage. It didn't happen in the woods;
it happened in school.



The jargon that is handed out in the schools harmonizes all too happily
with their moral and metaphysical pretensions, which are best expressed
in the vaguest possible terms. While vague, however, the terms must sound
important and must leave the impression that if you and I don't understand
them clearly, it is because we are laymen to whom these mysteries have not
been opened. The language of jargon arises from ignorance, but, once constituted,
establishes itself not as {\bfseries knowledge}, of course, since that would
invite verification, but as wisdom, a matter presumably of the heart and
not the reason. Our schools have become the temples of a mystery religion,
and their graduates, from provosts to foresters, have at least learned the
lingo of the rituals.



\chapter{Grant Us, Oh Lord}



One of the most important uses of language in all cultures is the performance
of magic. Since language deals easily with invisible worlds, it's natural
that it provide whatever access we think we have to the world of the spirits.
Even in cultures that overtly deny a belief in the spirit world, the anthropologist
from Mars would discover in their language evidence that denies the denial.
The Jiukiukwe address elaborate incantations to the Great-grandfather Anaconda
just as the Manhassetites exhort their cars to start and the stock market
to rise. Wherever language exists, it is used in the attempt to constrain,
or appease, or flatter, or beseech the spirit world.



Typically, the language of incantation is oblique and arcane, always
distinguished in some formal way from the language of everyday speech. The
gods and spirits are ordinarily not addressed by name, unless you really
have their numbers and can {\bfseries command}  them, and the benefits
sought are usually phrased in delicate euphemisms and contrived circumlocutions.
There are also, in all languages, certain magical words, words not common
in the daily lexicon and sometimes known only to the initiated few. If you
know these words, you can at least compel the attention of the spirits.
For any speaker of a language, its use displays his license of membership
in the culture and elicits from other members whatever is included in the
list of privileges and benefits, but a more special form of the language
can admit him to inner circles. The most special forms of all are understood
to admit him into the spirit world itself. It is not uncommon that the priestly
caste of a culture goes even beyond a special form of the language and adopts,
if only for ceremonial purposes, an entirely different language.



We have no more confidence in the priests, but that is by no means to
say that we have no more confidence in magic. We have simply consecrated
new priests to its service. We cannot, in fact, abandon magic, because our
language {\bfseries assumes}  the existence of persons and powers not of
this world, the world of immediate experience, and if among them we can
perceive ``mankind'' and ``gravity,'' we can also perceive
such things as ``Lady Luck'' and ``fate.'' These entities
are not {\itshape in} the corporeal world; they dwell in language. They can
be evoked and, in some sense, dealt with, through language, provided, of
course, that we know exactly what to say. The assumption of a spiritual
reality underlies ``Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art''
as well as ``Rain, rain, go away.'' It is the root of poetry. It
is also the root of lots of gibberish --- the abracadabras and open sesames
of our time.



The new priests are rarely found in churches. They flourish everywhere.
Wherever some inner circle of initiates undertakes to deal in arcane formulae
with the in substantial, there must be a priesthood. It will have
all of the gimmicks and trappings of any other priesthood. The candidate
for consecration will have to undergo lengthy training in lore and ceremony
and much study of the holy writings and will, at the last step, have to
satisfy the adepts that he is worthy to sit in their company. Once admitted,
he will be granted powers and privileges, among them the power of a highly
specialized form of language and the privilege of being taken seriously
by the multitudes when he utters it, however little meaning they may take
from what he says.



Many of these priests are professors. They have learned their lore and
lingo in our colleges and universities, and there they lurk. Sometimes,
to be sure, some of them go into classrooms to practice the skills of Delphic
utterance and to look for the occasional promising novice whose calling
can be confirmed through {\bfseries his}  aptitude for Delphic utterance, but
mostly they spend their time in untroubled meditation and earnest prayer.
To them we turn for the fruits of their meditation and prayer. What, we
ask, is the meaning of it all? How can we know the good? How will it fare
with us in the future? Their answers are prompt and lengthy, but unintelligible.
They meditate, you see, on inputs and parameters, on teaching situations,
learning situations, passing situations, and even on situation situations,
and on things like general insight into the knowledge of a discipline. And
for the answers to those universal questions that vex us, they pray not
to some god for favor but to some grant for funds.



In the whole United States of America at this moment there are only twenty-seven
college professors who have not at one time or another sat around with a
few accomplices and plotted to think up a good gimmick for a government
grant,{\bfseries  and}  the wording of the prayer that would bring the money.
(A grant from some foundation is even better; those G-men are fussy about
little things like bookkeeping and expense accounts.) Grant-getting has
become one of the regular duties of some professors and administrators.
Many colleges and universities have established whole bureaucracies devoted
to grant-getting, and energetic hustlers, who never forget, like the rest
of us, that Barnum was right, go from campus to campus offering, at stiff
prices, seminars, workshops, conferences, and revival meetings on the art
of the successful grant prayer.



The enterprises supported by these grants often reach some interesting
conclusions, or ``findings,'' as the priests call them. They frequently
discover some truth on the order of: Cornered animals will fight. Orphans,
they reveal, don't get enough attention from their parents. It has been
definitively demonstrated at public expense in New Jersey, for instance,
that students who are learning to write learn better the more they write.
That's not all. The same ``studies have shown'' that teachers of
writing teach better in those rare cases when they themselves can write.
Those conclusions may have cost a lot of money, but they're worth it, wouldn't
you say? Knowledge is power.



The search for a grant usually begins with an impromptu worship service
also known as brainstorming or as a bull session. The term ``brain storm''
was coined in 1906 by Harry Thaw's lawyer. Clouds of witnesses had seen
his client pumping bullets into Stanford White, so it seemed that the defendant
would need something more than an alibi that would place him in a bowling
alley in Union City that very evening. Accordingly, the cunning advocate
convinced the jury that Thaw had suffered, that very evening, a violent
fit of passing madness, a brain storm, which momentarily excused him from
certain moral imperatives. Thus Thaw escaped the electric chair. We must
presume, therefore, that there is no point in taking what would seem the
appropriate action with regard to the concoctors of grant proposals. It
would probably be impossible to get a conviction.



Brainstorming sessions go something like this: Some professors are dawdling
over coffee in the faculty dining room. They are complaining about the quality
of the students these days, the difficulty of finding parking spaces immediately
adjacent to the buildings in which they teach occasionally, the stupidity
of the dean, and the difficulty of promotion. One of them adds that he can't
stand to teach in room 322 because the blackboard is at the back of the
room behind the students, and when he wants to draw some cabalistic symbols,
he has to thread his way through the desks. In another age, this wouldn't
have been all that bad, but nowadays the girls are wearing denim workshirts
buttoned up to the neck. Someone suggests moving the furniture around, but
this is ignored as not worthy of an academic discussion. Why not, someone
else asks, just stay there and lecture at their backs? Maybe the students
would learn more because they wouldn't have to pretend to be attentive,
and besides, it's easier to check your zipper. By now things are getting
serious.



The bright young radical, an assistant professor who used to have a beard
when he was only an instructor, points out that the traditional arrangement
of a classroom is militaristic, even fascistic, and therefore unsuitable
for a nonauthoritarian education in a democratic society. Wouldn't it be
interesting to see what would happen if{\bfseries  all}  classes were taught
from behind? That does it, of course, and someone says the words, the incantatory
formula that opens to the faithful visions of a new, and better, much better,
world: ``I bet you could get a grant.''



Even right after a big lunch, college professors are hungry. Someone
says, Hey, why don't we write it up? What can we lose? A little time, that's
all. Time is something college professors can find lots of, and we can easily
imagine the document that might come of the idle rapping: ``A Proposal
to Study Pedagogical/Instructional Outcomes as Related to the Unconscious
Symbolism of Traditional and Non-Traditional Placement of Individual Learning
Stations within the Primary Learning-Facility Location\ldots '' Of course,
that's just a rough draft.



That language is necessary. No project officer would look twice at the
naked truth. ``What would happen'' must become ``Pedagogical/Instructional
Outcomes,'' and it would be even better if ``behaviors'' could
be fitted in somehow. (If you speak of ``behavior'' in the singular,
your degree is revoked and you are sent to do penance by teaching in a ghetto
school in Tulsa. You may, however, speak freely of ``a behavior.'')
``Placement'' seems insufficiently modified. There's no such thing
as too much modification, and ``Placement'' has only the meager
``Traditional and Non-Traditional.'' After all, anyone who knows
what he's talking about has to prove it by making it clear that by ``placement''
he means putting something somewhere in a place, and that place is in space,
right? Right! Let's have ``Spatial Placement.'' Come to think of
it, ``Proposal'' is standing there naked-it has no modifier at all.
How about ``Tentative''? God, no! We'll never get a grant with anything
tentative. Maybe ``Research Proposal''? Not bad. Or even ``experimental.''
I mean, it is an experiment, after all. Even better. Why not take both?
``An Experimental Research Proposal.'' That should do it. Someone
murmurs, How about ``theoretical/experimental''? and although that's
obviously a good idea, it's too late. The phrase has already been jotted
down in big, black capital letters.



Someone now suggests ``subliminal'' in place of, or even in conjunction
with, maybe with a slash, ``unconscious,'' but nobody else likes
it. It sounds too Madison Avenue, and it might take some of the bite out
of ``Unconscious.'' ``Unconscious'' is a very potent word-it's
something psychological, Freud, you know, and it's very ``in'' these
days. On with the work. Desks have been handled very nicely with ``Individual
Learning Stations,'' but it won't hurt at all to change that to ``Individualized
Learning Stations.'' Everyone is delighted with ``Primary Learning-Facility
Location'' for classroom, and the hard part is done. We now have the
proposal in what is ritually known as its ``finalized'' form:


\begin{quote}

  
An Experimental Research Proposal to Study Pedagogical/Instructional
  Outcomes/Behaviors as Related to the Unconscious Symbolism of Traditional
  and Non-Traditional Spatial Placement of Individualized Learning Stations
  within the Primary Learning-Facility Location

\end{quote}



Of course, it still needs some work, now that we see it in its finalized
form. ``Study'' is puny and insufficiently affective. After all,
we're not just going to study something; who'd pay us for that? We have
to be more positive. Let's try ``evaluate''; everybody is willing
to pay big for ``values'' these days. Even ``to evaluate,''
however, seems a little pale. We'll probably end up with ``to critically
evaluate'' or perhaps ``to critically/objectively evaluate.''
That has the power of the slash and shows that we're not stodgy about infinitives.



That just about does it. All that remains is to cook up a few corroborative
details, stuff like the instruments (that means tests), the controls, the
hypotheses, the expected findings/outcomes, and the questions that the study/evaluation
will be centered around. (These things are invariably described as ``centered
around'' something. That is, of course, a metaphysical proposition understood
by the priests, but a mystery to us laymen.) Now we can shoot the whole
thing off to HEW or someplace, and with a little bit of luck and the favor
of the hidden powers we'll all be on half time for the next two years. That
means longer lunches and more brainstorming, and, who knows, why not, maybe
we can even think up another grant.



Historically, priests have never troubled to deny that their language
had the effect of concealing secret things from the uninitiated but revealing
those things to the adept. Nor did they feel any need to deny it, since
those were goals thought legitimate by both parties, who were in agreement
that in language was the key to open doors into other worlds, but that to
use it required some special and difficult mastery. Ancient priests, however,
seem to have used their special mastery of language to talk about (and even
{\bfseries to} ) things that they at least believed to be real, although impalpable,
and inexpressible in any other way. The brainstorming grant-seekers, on
the other hand, know very well that a desk is real and palpable and easy
to express and{\bfseries  therefore}  choose to veil it as an Individualized
Learning Station, thus suggesting mystery where they know there is none.
Where the ancient priests spoke in such terms as they could devise of things
not to be understood in the ordinary vernacular, the modern priest speaks
of things easily understood in language{\bfseries  not}  easily understood.
The mystery has migrated from the thing itself to the language. Under the
circumstances, in this age of disbelief, they've done the best they could.
They have the words, but they just don't have the tune. Where the language
of magic was once the visible shell of the unimaginable within, all that
is unimaginable now is the shell, because what is within is obvious and
prosaic. The modern priests have no substantial core, not even an imagined
one, to put at the heart of the arcane language of incantation and prayer.



Consider this passage from a grant-seeking proposal meant to do something
or other about the training of teachers:


\begin{quote}

  
(1) Teaching is the application of a {\itshape systematic series of actions
directed toward specific ends.} [Italics in original.] (2) Within the
general system of teaching acts are many subsets of actions and processes.
(3) For example, based upon developments in philosophy, psychology, and
communications theory, teaching and learning are now seen as reciprocal
relations within a specialized system of information processing. (4) Teaching
also requires the ability to relate knowledge of the processes of human
growth and psycho-social development to the instruction of individuals
and groups. (5) Translation, transformation, and organization of subject
matter into meanings appropriate for the age or ability of learners is
another process within teaching.

\end{quote}



Knowledge is a collection of statements. Not all our statements, however,
are statements of knowledge. Language wouldn't work if it didn't have abiding
forms and structures, but sometimes it doesn't work just {\bfseries because}  it
has those forms and structures. We're free to put anything we like into
the natural forms, and, because the forms{\bfseries  are}  natural, it's
easy to conclude that we have said something because we have said it in
the same form in which we might{\bfseries  in fact}  have said something.
Since it makes some sense to say ``lions are dangerous,'' we may
think that any other statement in that same form will make some other sense.
This form, however, is so brief and clear that not many of us would be confused
into thinking that ``lions are ultimate'' has to mean something
just because of its form. When both form and matter are more complicated,
it's easier to be confused.



Remember the questionnaire. Take the perfectly reasonable statement,
``A goal of teaching is to give students knowledge.'' Not especially
startling, or even useful, it is at least a statement that can be accepted
as meaning something. It is an empirical hypothesis that could imaginably
be checked through observation and experience. Its form, however, is a container
into which we can pour whatever we please. We can say, as that silly questionnaire
did say, ``A goal of teaching is to provide general insight into the
knowledge of a discipline.'' It sounds fine; but if you bother to think
about it, you see that it is nonsense. Of course, you're not expected to
think about it; you're expected to{\bfseries  feel}  about it.



When you solicit the favor of the hidden powers with prayer, you do not
presume to instruct them in matters intellectual. It is not your wish that
they{\bfseries  understand}  what you say, but that they{\bfseries  love you}  for saying it. Consider the first sentence in the passage quoted
above: ``Teaching is the application of a {\itshape systematic series} of
{\itshape actions directed toward} specific{\itshape  ends.''} It is grammatically
impeccable. It sounds just like a meaningful statement. It {\itshape is} meaningful.
It, too, is an empirical hypothesis that we might conceivably confirm or
confute through experience and observation. It has, furthermore, the sound
of authority, with all those careful modifiers and distinctions. Can't you
just see some gray, distinguished professorial gent, tweed and pipe, pushing
his glasses up on his forehead, staring awhile in deep thought at the book-lined
wall of his study, and revealing at last, you hanging on his every word,
not only that teaching is a systematic series of actions but that it is
actually directed toward specific ends? Those words are even put in italics,
which means that this is the heart of the matter, and you'd better pay attention
if you want to learn something.



That, as it happens, was a mistake. In the cool calm of the book-lined
study you might be sucked into believing that you had been told something
important, but when you can consider the words on paper, and in italics
at that, you can see that this is a statement designed to leave a certain
impression on those who pay no attention. That was the case, also, with
that business about providing general insight into the knowledge of a discipline.



When we pay attention, we can see that the statement, while certainly
reasonable, is simply worthless to anyone who does in fact want to understand
teaching. It purports to tell us what teaching is and tells us what just
about anything is. Take the name of whatever it is you do for a living,
or, for that matter, as a hobby, and drop it into that form in the place
of ``teaching.'' It'll make sense. It will still be rubbish. But
not, of course, worthless rubbish. Grant-seeking, after all, is also a systematic
series of actions directed toward specific ends.



The second sentence has the same characteristic; it can describe anything
we do: ``Within the general system of teaching acts are many subsets
of actions and processes.'' It is cunning, however, because it sounds
as though the writer has thought something out and is now elaborating on
the first sentence. He will be delighted if you nod your head and say, ``Oh,
yes. Now I understand. Subsets. Sure. Subsets of actions and of processes.''



That sentence is a perfect example of the Principle of Unnecessary Specification.
It's the sort of thing that's often found in the language of incantation,
where it sometimes has poetic and impressive qualities: ``We have erred
and strayed\ldots we have followed too much the devices and desires of our
own hearts.'' In such appearances, the elaboration of specification,
probably an inheritance from certain typical forms of Hebrew poetry, often
does provide delicate distinctions interesting to think about. In the modern
priest-jargon, however, this is seldom the case. When we are told that a
``general system'' is made up of ``subsets of actions and processes,''
our minds are not notably clarified.



Usually, in fact, such examples of the Principle of Unnecessary Specification
are meant to be the opposite of clarifying. Indeed, its practitioners are
traditionally careful not only to provide detailed specification where none
is needed but also to withhold it where it {\itshape is} needed. What, for instance,
are those presumed ``developments in philosophy, psychology, and communications
theory''? Furthermore, where specifications are provided, they are either
obvious, as in the case of the subsets of actions and processes, or incomprehensible,
like the miniature incantation in the fifth sentence: ``Translation,
transformation, and organization.'' A solemn sound. In some metaphysical
fashion, the three are one in the mind of the writer, obviously, because
when they finally get a verb toward the end of the sentence, it's the singular
``is.'' ``Translation, transformation, and organization\ldots is another process within teaching.'' Who says faith is dead? This
triune mystery is made up of lesser mysteries: The translation of subject
matter into meanings, The transformation of subject matter into meanings,
and The organization of subject matter into meanings. Quite a trick. That's
not all. If they mean what they say, we have to conclude that the ``meaning''
of Magna Carta suitable for stupid nine-year-olds just wouldn't do for normal
high school seniors.



Let's try to understand all of this. First of all, this writer seems
to allow that there is such a thing as ``subject matter.'' This
is a handsome admission from an educationist, but it is not, of course,
an endorsement of the foolish notion that subject matter is what is to be
taught. The teacher, we see, has to take the subject matter and ``translate''
it into ``meanings'' appropriate for these or those students. If
you're sitting there wondering what it might mean, for instance, to translate
the formula for finding the area of a circle into ``meanings'' more
appropriate for some students than for others, then you're just not thinking.
For students in the Italian quarter, you talk about pizzas; for students
in Dubuque, apple pie; in Laredo, tortillas. That's only the beginning.
Now that the subject matter has been translated, it must also be transformed
into, presumably, yet other meanings than those derived by translating it.
And then organized. That part sounds simple at first, because we {\itshape can
}imagine ways of organizing subject matter, while it passes understanding
to see how we can translate or transform it. However, although we might
organize subject matter in any number of ways, that won't be good enough\ldots Somehow, we must be sure that our organization converts the subject matter
into ``meanings'' precisely appropriate for exactly these students.



The ordinary citizen in the streets imagines that teaching geometry,
for example, must be a fairly straightforward business, at least in principle.
You show the students the assumptions and explain the principles; you demonstrate
the methods; you provide problems and guide their practice; you go logically
from step to step, and the students can learn not only geometry but skills
and discipline useful for thinking in general. Wrong. For professionals
of education, if we are to believe this document (and you had better believe
it), the geometry itself is only the humblest first entry in a hierarchical
structure of acts and subsets of actions and processes and reciprocal relations
within a specialized system of information processing and the {\bfseries relation}  of knowledge to the processes of human growth {\bfseries and}  psycho-social
development{\bfseries  to}  the instruction of individuals {\bfseries and}  groups.
There. Then there's the business of translating geometry into those appropriate
meanings, and transforming it ditto, and organizing it ditto. Now you can
understand why the teacher of geometry in your local high school may be
a little weak in the geometry itself and why that unfortunate girl in Pennsylvania
can't punctuate. They have spent most of their time in college not actually
studying things like geometry and punctuation. They have been occupied with
the solemn contemplation of all the subsets of actions and processes, in
all of which they were ``taught'' by gurus to whom naked geometry
and mere punctuation, of which they may well have known nothing at all,
were nothing more than convenient starting places for an exercise in transcendental
elaboration. The study of education isn't like the study of plants or history;
it's like the study of angels.



You must not be curt when you address the hidden powers. They have all
the time in the world, and you must come before them as one who is properly
initiated into their ways. To address a prayer to the grant-giver, you must
show that you have what a court of law would call ``standing.''
That's why the Principle of Unnecessary Specification is so important. Anyone
who would confess, for instance, that he is concerned with mere ``instruction''
cannot expect much of a hearing from the grant-giver. That's why this document
is careful to explain that it is interested in the ``instruction of
individuals and groups.'' You and I would think it enough to say ``instruction''
and understand that there isn't anyone else to instruct except people, who
come to be instructed either as individuals or groups, because there isn't
any other possibility. Obviously, the grant-givers, either as individuals
or groups, do not need to be instructed as to this; they must want to know
the nature of our hearts, or something. The pious heart, you can be sure,
would have gone on beyond ``individuals and groups'' if only some
further category had been imaginable. The writer was probably a bit saddened
to have to say such a meager thing, and it may have been to make up for
it that he devised the sonorous ``translation, transformation, and organization''
formula for the next sentence.



The Principle of Unnecessary Specification is, of course, a great convenience
for writers who need to pad out what little they have to say, and it is
certainly true that many a grant proposal has been rejected out of hand
because it wasn't long enough, but padding isn't the only purpose of that
splendid principle. It has genuinely incantatory intentions and powers.
It can make the obvious seem profound, and the simple, complicated. It can,
furthermore, make the trivial seem very important indeed. Skillfully used,
it projects an atmosphere, one might even say an aroma, of great insight
and expertise about anything we might write. It is the incense of incantatory
prose, and a few deep whiffs can transport the intoxicated worshiper into
what grant-seekers of all persuasions would surely call ``new levels
of awareness.'' When we ascend to those new levels, we do so not in
elevators, but in ``integrated single-module vertical transportation
systems,'' as they are in fact called in government documents, and the
mentor who elevates us must be an ``integrated single module vertical
transportation system operations engineer.''



This may be silly language, but it is not the ignorant language of that
schoolteacher in Pennsylvania. It is carefully and knowingly contrived.
In fact, the constraints that must be observed in this language are even
greater than those laid upon the priests and necromancers of earlier ages.
They had to satisfy only the hidden powers and, occasionally, each other.
These modern spell-casters must always be mindful of pesky and impertinent
outsiders who nowadays presume to poke their noses into all sorts of things
too deep for them. The very taxpayers and parents of schoolchildren have
come to think that they have some right to understand --- and even to
question --- the intentions of the rulers and the clergy, the professionals,
as they call themselves. It's exasperating, but lacking a general return
to the social beliefs and standards of an earlier and easier time, there
isn't a hell of a lot to be done about it. Nevertheless, although they can't
send an uppity laity back into the Dark Ages, they can at least find a way
to keep it in the dark. Their language must serve the double purpose of
showing the hidden powers that they deserve the dough and making the ordinary
layman believe that what they think about is terribly complicated and important,
too complicated for him to understand and too important for him to meddle
with.



In this respect, the passage cited above is not entirely successful.
We {\bfseries can}  understand it, with a little attention, and we {\bfseries can
}  see that what little it says is so general and obvious that it's
not worth saying and that most of it says nothing that means anything at
all. The writer, of course, would still object that mere laymen cannot understand
such technical and esoteric things, but his objection would carry little
conviction. We've caught him in just too much nonsense. He is not a truly
great writer of balderdash, just a hack.



He misses greatness because, not having read Luther, he sins but meagerly.
His transgression is puny because while his heart is in the world of noncognition,
he wants to sound cognitive, like some of his respectable colleagues who
still deal with discernible facts. He doesn't mind {\bfseries living} in
Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, but he and his close neighbors have made a pact among
themselves not to give out their addresses. In short, he is willing to utter
nonsense, but he is afraid to be caught doing it, so he has to sound analytical
and ``official.''



Like love, however, perfect inanity casteth out fear. The next writer
has not only moved into the land of noncognition but has even taken up arms
in its perpetual war of worldwide conquest.




\chapter{Spirits from the Vasty Deep}



Bad writing is like any other form of crime; most of it is unimaginative
and tiresomely predictable. The professor of education seeking a grant and
the neighborhood lout looking for a score simply go and do as their predecessors
have done. The one litanizes about carefully unspecified developments in
philosophy, psychology, and communications theory, and the other sticks
up the candy store. The analogy is not perfect, of course, for the average
lout seldom nets more than thirty-five dollars per stickup, and he even
runs some little risk of getting caught. Nevertheless, the writing and the
stickup are equally routine and boring. It's not often that we find ourselves
admiring these criminals, therefore. Once in a while, however, some unusually
creative caper pleases us with its novelty or its audacity. So, too, with
the works of the grant-seekers, perhaps because creative force is so much
less common in grant-seekers than in other culprits. We turn now to just
such an enterprise. If it were only a little bit less illiterate, it would
seem to have been written by someone who had read deeply in Luther and even
Nietzsche and had decided to sin boldly and to hell with {\itshape Sklavenmoral}.
We find here none of that meager, mealymouthed obsequiousness that piously
assures us that teaching and learning have now been shown --- {\bfseries really} 
--- to have something to do with one another. That's the tepid prayer
of a half-baked scholastic. What follows is the work of a veritable academic
dervish:


\begin{quote}

  
Project WEY --- Washington Environmental Yard (1972) is a manifestation
  of the intercommunal, process-oriented, interage, interdisciplinary type
  of change vehicle toward an environmental ethic from the school-village
  level to a pan-perspective. The urban focus of the project as the medium
  has been inestimably vital since it is generally speaking the message.
  Situated near the central downtown area of the city of Berkeley and a mere
  block from civic center, Washington Elementary School courts the thousands
  of daily onlookers/passersby (20,000 autos!) traveling on a busy boulevard
  with easy access to the physical transformation and social interactions
  (at a distance to close-up) --- a virtual open space laboratory. It has
  served evocatively as a catalyst for values confrontation, even through
  a soft mode of visual/physical data exchange system. Since 1971, the dramatic
  changes have represented a process tool for the development of environmental/educational
  value encounters on-site/off-site, indoors/outdoors and numerous other
  bipolar entities and dyads. The clients represent a mirror of the macro-world
  just as the children and parents of the school reflect more than thirty
  different ethnic groups --- as one of numerous dimensions of diversity.

\end{quote}



It is difficult to comment on this writing, and dangerous as well, since
too much attention to this sort of thing may well overthrow the mind. The
earlier passage is at least decipherable, but this is a form of contemporary
glossolalia and not to be grasped by the reason alone. It requires the gift
of faith as well.



We do see, at least, what it's all about. It's about a change vehicle,
of course, a change vehicle toward an ethic. We know also that the focus
has been vital, inestimably vital, in fact, so we need not expect that there
will be any attempt to estimate the degree of the focus's vitality. That's
good. We don't know for sure, of course, but we can reasonably guess, since
the school courts all those onlookers/passersby in their 20,000 autos when
they ought to be paying attention to their driving, that the busy boulevard
is probably strewn with tangled wreckage and the dead and bleeding bodies
of motorists. The carnage, apparently, serves as a virtual open-space laboratory
of social interactions resulting in physical transformations. What could
be clearer?



We know that some ``it'' or other --- the school? the project?
--- has itself served, and evocatively at that, as a catalyst for values
confrontation, ``even'' through a soft mode, which makes it clear
that it is unusual for something to serve evocatively as a catalyst through
a soft mode, but that {\bfseries this}  something has nevertheless managed to
do so and thus deserves generous funding. We see that changes have somehow
{\bfseries represented}  a tool, a tool for the development of all sorts
of doubled-up things, including certain unspecified but surely numerous
and important ``bipolar entities and dyads.'' (Here we must be careful
not to commit some sacrilege; bipolar entities might be some kind of powerful
spirits, and those dyads might be something like those dynamite chicks that
lurk in trees.) And, just as changes have represented a tool, the clients
have represented a mirror. There. That gives us a process-oriented pan-perspective.



The writer of this interesting passage, just one paragraph of a grant
proposal, is paid by taxpayers to teach would-be teachers how to go out
into the world and make comfortable livings being paid by taxpayers as teachers
of something that is called Environmental Education. Environmental Education,
along with its numerous cousins, deserves some attention, not because it
is interesting or important in itself, but because it is, or perhaps it
{\bfseries represents}, a triumph of language over intelligence. All the
cousins do the same. They are things like Health Education, Consumer Education,
Intercultural Education, Sex Education, Career Education --- the tribe
is too numerous to list in full. Besides, new progeny are spawned every
semester.



These educations are the Snopeses of education itself. They are aggressive
and determined and trashy enough not to be subject to the scrupulous restraints
of the genteel tradition. The meek, betweeded professors of philosophy must
surely succumb some day to something that will probably be called Values
Education. Intercultural Education, for instance, has already seized the
high ground once held, but diffidently, by the anthropologists, and it will
be a vigorous and profitable industry when anthropology has become a quaint,
antiquarian specialty like Sanskrit. Consumer Education starts with what
used to be a single lesson in seventh-grade arithmetic --- how to write
a check, remember? --- picks up a little substance from the budgeting
lesson in home economics, and goes on to displace economics itself along
with a good hunk of sociology and biology-preparing nutritious meals, you
know. (In fact, home economics and sociology had it coming; they were Snopeses
in their time.) Flem Snopes started out by boosting himself a piece of a
little diner on the outskirts of town and ended up owning the bank and most
of the real estate. His numerous relations followed him in geometrical proportions.
We can expect that each of these educations will draw others in its train
and birth hosts of new educations.



This metastasis of educations is only in part a social phenomenon; it
is also a linguistic phenomenon. The power of language is so great that
it can call things into existence simply through naming them. At this moment,
for instance, there is no such thing as enharmonic interpersonal dynamism,
but all it needs to become the subject of a profitable self-betterment book
or even a whole new subject of study in the colleges is an energetic go-getter
who can write it up. There will be converts and workshops. There will be
scholarly papers and appearances on talk shows. Dissensions and heresies
will arise, and the neo-enharmonic interpersonal dynamists will contend
with the revisionist enharmonic inter{\bfseries cultural}  dynamists. Money will
be made, and swarms of the addlepated will most unexpectedly make livings.
Some of them will buy whole wardrobes of polyester double-knit leisure suits
and become professors of Enharmonic (now we can give it capitals) Interpersonal
Dynamism Education. Although we will pay the cost in dollars, the empire
will be built of words.



Obviously, if Enharmonic Interpersonal Dynamism (EID, okay?) is to get
off the drawing board, one of the first things it will need is a grant.
If we can show how EID can provide an inestimably vital change vehicle toward
the reciprocal relationships of teaching and learning suggested by the latest
findings in philosophy, psychology, and communications theory, we can easily
convince some saps in the federal government to fork over the funds. It's
a little more complicated than sticking up the candy store, of course, but
the potential profit is larger, inestimably larger, in fact. Furthermore,
if you get caught sticking up the candy store, many rough people will treat
you rudely. If you invent EID and make it famous, you'll be offered tenure
at the teacher's college of your choice.



Such things actually happen. Consider the example of something called
Career Education. The Jiukiukwe have no word for Career Education, nor could
they, for their language does not permit the modification of one noun by
another. (It is no accident that some of our greatest follies flow from
the fact that we can string nouns together with abandon.) Of course, the
Jiukiukwe have only the one career, banging trees with stones; even fish-finding
is so rare that they think of it more as an avocation. They would be baffled,
naturally, by the term Career Education. We are baffled, too, but we have
to pretend not to be lest we be taken for elitist reactionaries. How then,
we must figure out, do we come to have, and at considerable expense, something
called Career Education, which is {\bfseries not}, as the innocent might think,
a training in the necessary skills of this or that career?



Unlike the Jiukiukwe, we have many careers, and there are still some
American schoolchildren who think that they would like to grow up and make
an honest living in one of them. It used to be that a mere education in
reading and writing and ciphering was thought a good beginning for just
about any career. As certain careers became matters of greater and greater
technical skills, it began to appear that the would-be nuclear physicist
or neurosurgeon might do well to start some of his training as early as
possible. This is obviously not an inane idea, but it also {\bfseries isn't}  the
idea behind Career Education. The practitioners of Career Education can
hardly have such a concern in mind when they arrange for third graders to
visit the bagel factory and study the work of the head bagel-baker. What
they have in mind is the presumed necessity of revealing to the children
that there {\bfseries is}  such a person as a bagel-baker so that peace and harmony
and tolerance will break out among us. That's not all. Maybe some of those
darling kiddies would like to become bagel-bakers themselves. And why not?
It's an honorable trade. So here are some clever tests (instruments) designed
to discover bagel-baking aptitudes even in third graders. There are brigades
of people who make, and score, and interpret such tests, and other brigades
who then sit down and take counsel with the third graders about their chosen
careers as bagel-bakers. And {\bfseries that's}  not all. How can a third
grader choose a career without profound self-knowledge and some insight
into the value system inherent in the various careers? We need to offer
courses that teach these things to third graders, and yet other courses
to teach the teaching of these things to yet larger children who can then
find career satisfaction and fulfillment as teachers of Career Education.
This sort of thing, as most of you will remember, used to be taken care
of by an occasional captioned picture in the reading book: ``The policeman
is your friend. He helps you cross the street and takes you home if you
are lost.'' That's about as much as any third grader needs to know about
a career in law enforcement.



So what would {\bfseries you}  do if you had to fill a handful of pages on
the subject of Career Education? What else {\bfseries is}  there to do? You simply
must string a whole lot of words together. All of that stuff --- and more,
much more, whole books full --- is a perfectly inevitable consequence
of the simple existence of the term Career Education. You might play the
same game for yourself by inventing your own education. Somebody has probably
already taken Media Education and Commuter Education, but you might try
things like Recreation Education and Religion Education. It's important
that both words be nouns. Notice that Religion Education is different from
Religious Education, for instance. Religious Education might actually have
some subject matter; Religion Education, however, would be aimed not at
teaching this or that {\bfseries about}  a religion but at alerting students
to the fact that this or that religion does exist and suggesting how they
might want to feel about that. In like fashion, Investment Education, a
likely candidate, would not undertake to teach people how to invest. It
would reveal that there is such a thing as investing and that it makes America
strong.



The process obviously has no limits, because our language has no limits.
Anything we can talk about, we can talk about. Consequently, we can expect
that by this time next year there will be at least three schools in which
the study of history has been replaced by highly relevant rap sessions called
History Education. Courses in History Education will not bother students
with the terms of the Treaty of Versailles or the details of the growth
of American Federalism. They will provide the students with a personal appreciation
of the fact that there {\bfseries i} s such a thing as history and that we are
{\bfseries all}  a part of it --- isn't that wonderful? --- and that even
the least of us is, therefore, relevant. Literature Education and Mathematics
Education are still in the planning, or preproposal, stages, but their day
will come. And just wait till you see Foreign Language Education, which
will raise students' consciousnesses about the many marvelous languages
spoken all around the world by all sorts of people whose very interesting
value systems we really ought to appreciate as much as we can. After all,
there's no real or relevant need to learn the language of the Jiukiukwe.
Let's learn to appreciate what the nature of that language tells us about
those simple but warm and wonderful people whose treatment of their senior
citizens ought to be a lesson to us all.



All of the ``educations'' are strings of words, of course, not
things in the world. Once we have the strings of words, however, we can
go about and do things in the world so that some part of it may come to
look like the thing we have described in the words. There's nothing wrong
with that; in fact, there's everything right with that. That's how ideas
and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is
in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything
that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string
of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities {\bfseries are}  expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the
words.



Here are the words in which our mystical prophet of Environmental Education
expresses the aims of his chosen career:


\begin{quote}

  
A topian educational system of values and its existing isomorphic, formulated
  goals and means can be traumatically challenged by EE (Environmental Education)
  and its evolving, diverse-goal system as EE functions as a catalytical
  non-discipline to prepare and facilitate people to move through a meta-transition
  into the phase of non-stationary culture\ldots 

\end{quote}



A catalytical non-discipline. We can understand what a non-discipline
is like just by considering the word ``topian.'' It might refer
to those Pompeian wall decorations called ``topia,'' but then again
it might not. Perhaps it's supposed to be the opposite of ``utopian,''
but also maybe not. Perhaps a topian system is a system that actually {\bfseries is} 
someplace, in a {\itshape topos},  and is thus characterized to distinguish it
from the ``evolving, diverse-goal system,'' which is, presumably,
{\bfseries not}  someplace. If you find yourself traumatically challenged
by these choices, that's good. Pick whichever you please. In a non-discipline
it doesn't matter. That's why non-disciplines are so rewarding to teach
--- you can't get anything wrong. Be grateful that you have been facilitated
to move through a meta-transition into a phase.



It would be a polite euphemism to call the writer of that barbarous nonsense
an illiterate. The word just doesn't do the job. The writer, however, is
a university professor supported by taxpayers. He has degrees in education,
and has satisfied others of that clan that he is worthy to sit in their
company. What did they ask of him? How did they decide that he was, indeed,
worthy to profess? Was it his vast knowledge of his subject? Obviously not;
his ``subject'' is a non-discipline. Was it his power to communicate
the nonexistent knowledge of his non-discipline? Well, yes. In a {\bfseries way},
yes, that is. It must{\bfseries }  have been his power to sound as though he might
well {\bfseries be}  communicating some unknowledge in a non-discipline.
They must have thought that he could, indeed, call spirits from the vasty
deep. His prose, like the thinking it reveals, is full of cloudy suggestions
of something beyond the range of mere cognition. He has been given power,
if not over the entities and dyads, certainly over the ignorant and superstitious.
Who else would sign up for courses in a catalytical non-discipline?



Both grant-prayer examples evoke images of a world that is not, of course,
and in that way they are alike. In each case the image is the image of the
mental world where the writer dwells, whether he knows it or not. The worlds
are different, however, because this priesthood, like any other, has its
conservative wing and its lunatic fringe, its Thomists and its Pentecostalists.
The first writer (back in chapter 10) is orthodox and self-satisfied. He
evokes a world in which pale abstractions move among the spheres in cycles
and epicycles, or subsets of actions and processes. Translation, transformation,
and organization, elemental, immaterial entities, merge and fuse into the
transubstantiation of ``meaning.'' This is a world untouched by
human hands. In the universe of ``education,'' no grubby brats bedevil
harried teachers; no chalk dust clouds the air; no trays clatter to the
floor in noisy cafeterias; no smelly socks litter the locker room. We find
only fleshless principalities and powers, developments and relations, developments
in philosophy, psychology, and communications theory, reciprocal relations
and abilities to relate. This is a world where any minor German metaphysician
of the nineteenth century would feel right at home, but where Walt Whitman
would run lunatic.



Strangely, people who write and think like that insist that they are
champions of what they have named ``humanistic'' education. They
think, or they say that they think, that education ought to instill certain
socially desirable attitudes and humanitarian values, and, accordingly,
that a teacher must be ``humanistic.'' A teacher who is too knowledgeable
in his subject is likely to become a ``mere'' expert, a slave of
information, so the humanistic educationists take care to prevent that by
arranging that would-be teachers spend as little time as possible in the
study of any subject. This gives them more time to spend in humanistic studies
where they can develop abilities to relate. But the language gives the game
away. That grant-writer simply isn't interested in anything human. Indeed,
he isn't even interested in anything concrete. He is interested in spirits.



The Environmental Educationist, on the other hand, is a visionary of
apocalyptic enthusiasm. In his world a focus speaks a message and a manifestation
of a vehicle toward an ethic materializes, or almost, out of the swirling
fogs of off-site/on-site indoors/outdoors bipolar entities and dyads. He
opens the seventy-seventh seal, and a catalytical non-discipline facilitates
us to move through a meta-transition into a phase. In miraculous fashion,
not to be understood by reason unaided by revelation, clients ``represent''
a mirror, and changes, a tool. It's {\itshape Walpurgisnacht} in a soft mode
of a visual/physical data exchange system. Where the first writer is a would-be
theologian pretending to reason, the second is a shaman pretending to dance
up demons. And he does, he does.



Our shamans may be false, but they have danced up real demons. As we
have become more and more aware of what is happening in education and language
--- they go together --- we have sought remedies. The shamans have promised
us cures. The cures are all lethal.



\chapter{Darkling Plain English}



We have all been charmed and gratified in recent times by what seems
to be an official attempt to stamp out jargon and gobbledygook. From a President
himself we have heard a call for plain English, and state legislatures here
and there are drafting and passing laws requiring simplicity in the wording
of contracts and regulations. We are delighted to see that lawyers and moneylenders,
also landlords and insurance companies, are opposed to the process. Anything
that displeases those odious enemies of clarity and good sense must be desirable,
and the cause of plain English is beginning to attract not only politicians
who see in it a safe way to please the public but many of those good-hearted
citizens who used to be members of SANE.



Here is an example of the sort of thing that infuriates the advocates
of plain English. It's an extract from one of those handbooks put out by
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, an outfit notorious not
only for its torture of English but for the fact that many of its thousands
of rules and regulations render each other what they call in Washington
``inoperative.'' It's hard to decide whether the people at OSHA
are simply ineffectual bumblers or supremely talented satirists boring from
within. Here, for instance, is how they define an exit: ``That portion
of a means of egress which is separated from all other spaces of the building
or structure by construction or equipment as required in this subpart to
provide a protected way of travel to the exit discharge.'' That's not
all. Now they elaborate on ``means of egress'': ``A continuous
and unobstructed way of exit travel from any point in a building or structure
to a public way [which] consists of three separate and distinct parts: the
way of exit access, the exit, and the way of exit discharge.''



That's certainly ugly, and it makes us wonder whether an exit has to
be defined at all, and, if it does, why couldn't it just be called a way
to get out. Then we wonder why a ``means of egress'' has to be defined
at all, and, if it does, why couldn't it be called a way to get to the exit.
If these reservations seem reasonable to you, it's because you're just not
thinking. You are assuming that any ghastly mess of verbiage that comes
from a bureaucracy needs to be simplified because it is needlessly complicated
to begin with. Wrong. As it happens, that horrid prose serves its aims perfectly.
Regulations of this nature have one clear purpose, and that is to answer,
before the fact, any imaginable questions that might be asked in a court
of law. For that purpose it's not enough to assume that everyone knows what
an exit is. Is a door an exit? Maybe, but maybe not, if a drill press just
happens to be standing in front of it. Is a hole in the wall acceptable
as an exit? Do you really get out of the building (let's say it's ready
to blow up) if you go through a door and find yourself in an enclosed courtyard
instead of a ``public way''? You don't have to be very clever to
think of lots of other such questions, and the writer of this regulation
is thinking about your questions. He has done a good job, although he has
written something very ugly. But it's {\bfseries only}  ugly; it's not
wrong, it's not more complicated than it has to be. It doesn't need simplification;
it needs simply to be kept pretty much out of sight, lest it provide some
plain English fanatics with what they think is a useful example.



There are, of course, lots of things that ought to be written in such
English as the citizens may understand, but there are lots of citizens who
ought to learn to read the English in which it is necessary to say some
things. This is not a distinction that the plain English faddist is always
able to make. For many of them, though, it doesn't really matter.



The marvelous thing about the plain English fad, for a politician, is
that there's no way it can hurt him. If he fights for automobile safety
or for gun control, he's bound to lose some votes and some campaign contributions.
On the other hand, if he comes out against automobile safety and against
gun control, he's bound to lose some votes and some campaign contributions.
Politicians have to balance things like this all the time, always hoping
to make a little more on the peanuts than they have to lose on the popcorn.
It's not easy, and they're delighted, actually, whenever they can find a
cause with a high yield of profit and very little overhead. Plain English
is just such a cause.



True, there are a few opponents of the simplification of legal and public
language, but just look at them --- a pack of notorious scoundrels. You
can always show a profit when you castigate lawyers, moneylenders, and landlords.
Not only are these enemies of good sense unpopular, but their case against
plain English is difficult to present and difficult to understand, and,
coming from them, sounds suspiciously self-serving. The case for plain English,
on the other hand, is so easy to state and seems so reasonable that it now
ranks with those splendid self-evident truths so dear to all Americans.



How can we tell whether or not something is written in plain English?
It's simple. We have a couple of systems available that call for counting
words and syllables in the average sentence and dividing something by something
or maybe multiplying something by something after we have divided something
by something. And there you have it --- a rational, concrete index in
the form of a number, a plain English score. A ``good'' score means,
naturally, that lots of Americans can understand it, and a ``bad''
score means that few Americans can understand it. Theoretically it ought
to be possible to write in such a way that {\bfseries no}  Americans can understand
your English, or so that{\bfseries  all}  Americans can understand your
English. In fact, the former is common, but when we find it we rarely discover
that its difficulty has anything to do with sentence length or numbers of
words and syllables. The latter, however, is impossible, since there are
so many Americans who can read nothing at all. Those various indexing systems
are not meant to deal with the extremes. They want only to say, of this
or that piece of prose, that it probably calls for an eighth-grade ability
to read, or a college graduate's ability to read, or something like that.
Let's hope that the scale is adjusted year by year, since this year's eighth
graders, like this year's college graduates, don't read quite as well as
last year's, although they do read a bit better than next year's. Unless
the indexers give this some thought, we'll be faced with a continual downward
revision of all those laws and contracts and regulations, because this year's
newly revised and simplified driver's license application form that almost
any high school graduate can read will be, in 1994, incomprehensible to
those who hold master's degrees in sociology or doctorates in education.



The problem has some entertaining qualities. We have found ways to produce
every year more and more high school graduates who can barely read. More
and more of the citizens are finding, accordingly, that more and more documents
are hard to read. The automatic populists, now common among us, see an obvious
solution to this problem. If the people are having trouble understanding
what is written, then we must write it more simply. It's analogous to the
view that if the people haven't got the brains to buckle their seat belts
or to refrain from sticking their hands into the blades of their lawn mowers,
then we must redesign the seat belts and the lawn mowers. We reveal thus
that our national commitment to education is pious hypocrisy. If we really
believed that the people could be taught, we would teach them the worth
of buckling their seat belts and keeping their hands out of the lawn mower
blades. We would even teach them to read, not just enough to puzzle out
some slightly complicated prose, but to read, when necessary, the inevitably
complicated expression of complicated ideas. It's as though you went to
the hospital with a broken arm and the people in the emergency room, instead
of setting the thing, got busy on the telephone trying to find you some
other line of work, something that requires only one arm.



Like all cockeyed social notions, the plain English movement invites
us to look around and see who's going to make a profit from it. A paranoid
observer might think to detect a massive conspiracy. And here's how it goes:
First we start providing the schools with lots of taxpayers' money to support
research into quaint and curious innovations in teaching children how to
read. This results in some extraordinary gimmick, and a very profitable
one, not only for some professionals of education who are paid to cook it
up but especially for that massive educational-industrial complex that makes
and sells at high prices books and flash cards and sets of gadgets to go
with every new fad. These people, of course, would like to see as many new
fads as possible, because each one makes all the old stuff obsolete. What
the gimmick is, is not important; for a while, and in some schools still,
it was the weird notion that reading would be better taught without reference
to the sounds of letters but rather through identifying whole words as symbols
of something. The latest gimmick seems to be speed reading, which will make
it possible, at a stiff price, to read a complete gothic romance in three
minutes and forty seconds, thus ensuring a steady market for gothic romances.
A well-trained keypunch operator could go through sixteen of them on her
lunch hour, provided of course that she ate something like a sandwich or
a slice of pizza. Speed reading does require the use of at least one hand.



Let the gimmick be whatever it is. Think of your own, if you need an
example, something like printing vowels in different colors or providing
new and tricky shapes for certain letters. These, of course, have been done,
so you'll have to stretch a bit; and, when you do come up with something
that seems unspeakably zany, keep your mouth shut. If you mention it in
public, it won't be long before someone offers to fund it. It's best to
avoid offering the occasion for sin. But enough. Let's say we have a gimmick.



Now we experiment, being careful to use methods and controls that would
make a first-year chemistry student blush and stating the problems and the
expected results (those we call ``outcomes'') in the silliest possible
jargon. Don't worry, we'll ``prove'' the efficacy of our gimmick
(remember the new math?). As a result, or outcome, although we'd rather
not use that word in the singular, more and more students in the public
schools will read less and less.



Do not make the mistake of thinking that this means that our gimmick
has failed. Pay attention. This means that the gimmick has succeeded. Remember,
we have taken the role of dentists handing out lollipops to ensure that
there will be no falling off of customers. Now that things are worse than
ever, we view with alarm the ``reading problem'' in the schools.
It's time for a new round of grants, projects, experimental proposals, expensive
consultants, packets of materials, instruction booklets, sets of visual
aids, more teachers, carpeted classrooms, air conditioning, just about anything
you can imagine. It's all good for the education business, and if it seems
to have been exaggerated, just you go footing around yourself and find anybody
anywhere who proposes that we can teach reading (or anything else) better
by spending less money.



If there were a conspiracy that worked all these wonders, you can imagine
the joy of the conspirators in the windfall that the plain English agitation
has brought them. In one way it's a happy result of that conspiracy, and
perhaps, therefore, not unexpected. Naturally, as fewer and fewer literate
people move out of the schools and start signing leases and borrowing money
for Corvettes and stereo systems, it more and more appears that the documents
put before them are just too hard. They're always too hard for somebody;
it's just that now we have more and more of those somebodies, and the problem
grows more visible. It becomes a cause; it suddenly seems that we can make
a case for rudimentary English as one of an American's inalienable rights.
You deprive him of that --- it's practically like forbidding the sale
of classic comics or those benoveled versions of movies. It's a splendid
cause for politicians and educationists, especially, because anyone who
opposes it must do so either out of some devious special interest by which
he lives or out of a positively un-American elitism intended to maintain
a rigid class structure and deprive the ignorant of access to professorships
in philosophy and literature. Both politicians and educationists will profit
from the cause, the politicians at once, in good will and support from the
public, and the educationists somewhat later, in more grants, and because
they will sooner or later be the very ones called on to do the necessary
simplifying.



The bureaucrats who have produced most of our dismal official English
will, at first, be instructed to fix it. They will try, but {\itshape nihil ex
nihilo.} That English is the mess it is because they did it in the first
place and they'll never be able to fix it. They write that kind of stuff
because that is the kind of stuff that they write. Ultimately, in desperation,
they will call on those people who say they know about these things ---
the professionals of reading and writing. There will be lucrative jobs and
consultancies available in every branch and department of government for
remedial-reading teachers. The foxes will be made the guardians of the hen
house.



Here is an example of what the bureaucrats will do when left to their
own devices. The following passage is from a document called ``Draft
Regulations to Implement the National Environmental Policy Act.'' It{\bfseries 
has}  been rewritten into what they call plain English, and a covering
letter from the chairman of the President's Council on Environmental Quality
says that it ``represents an extraordinary improvement over the existing
guidelines'':


\begin{quote}

  
The agency need make the finding of no significant impact available
  for public review for thirty days before the agency makes its final determination
  whether to prepare an environmental impact statement and before the action
  may begin only in one of the following limited circumstances:\ldots 

\end{quote}



Remember, this has been simplified; the original is hard to imagine.
There are no difficult words in this passage --- even the five syllables
of ``determination'' do not make it a difficult word, whatever they
might do to the passage's score. What these people {\bfseries mean}  by
``determination'' might be better served by ``judgment''
or even ``decision,'' but still, most readers will not be baffled
by ``determination.'' In fact, there's nothing at all --- neither
word nor thought --- nothing at all difficult for any moderately educated
reader in that passage. Why then is it so hard to understand? Why do you
have to read it over a couple of times, should you really care to know what
it means? Does this passage, already simplified from God knows what, need
further simplification? No. All it needs is a little attention to the stuff
that used to be taught to sixth-grade students back in the days when sixth-grade
students actually wrote compositions.



People who have learned even a little about how English works have all
heard about modifiers. They know that a modifier is something that tells
us something about something, and that there are many kinds of modifiers,
some with tricky names. The way we teach things like this, as though they
were subject to arbitrary rules like the rules of basketball, is so stupid
and tedious that most people block out modifiers as soon as possible. The
English system of modification, however, does not exist in a set of paltry
rules that do what they can, and fail, to describe some very elaborate operations
not simply of the language but of the mind. To say that an adjective modifies
a noun is worth nothing unless we see that sticking adjectives on nouns
is the outward equivalent of some mysterious inward process that goes on
in the mind. It's not entirely absurd to think that somewhere in the past
of mankind someone, for the first time, did in his mind the equivalent of
putting an adjective to a noun, and saw, not only a relationship, but {\bfseries this}  special relationship between two things of different kinds. That
moment was more important to our history than the flight of the Wright brothers.
In sum, all the seemingly complicated kinds of modification in English are
just ways of thinking and seeing how things go with each other or reflect
each other. Modifiers in our language are not {\bfseries aids}  to understanding
relationships; they are {\bfseries the ways}  to understand relationships.
A mistake in this matter either comes from or causes a clouded mind. Usually
it's both.



This passage clouds our minds not because what it means to say is difficult,
not because the matter is too technical for most of us, but for a very simple
reason. In effect, it says that the agency need do something only under
certain circumstances. That's a clear thought. They need do A only when
B. The nature of the relationship between A and B is tucked into the words
``need\ldots only.'' In the passage, thirty-four words intervene
between ``need'' and ``only,'' so that by the time we see
``only'' we have forgotten to expect any further modification of
``need.'' It's like finding one more step when you thought you had
reached the landing. Between those two words, furthermore, we may have been
a bit bewildered by something that sounds like a modification but isn't:
``impact available for public review.'' It takes a moment to look
back and see that ``available for public review'' is actually supposed
to go with ``finding.'' When we add to those two failures ---
failures of the writing to match the modification systems of the mind ---
the tedious parade of words and clauses not yet related to any idea that
we can identify, the passage becomes what it is, awkward, puzzling, and
exasperating. It requires of us more attention and backtracking than its
ideas are worth.



This passage does not need simplification or even a change in its choice
of words. It needs merely to have been written by someone with elementary
skills in finding the right thing to do on the page to call forth certain
things in the mind. The idea is not complicated; the prose, in fact, is
not complicated --- it's just bad. Nevertheless, it{\bfseries  could}  be
simplified even using that vocabulary. Here's how it might go:


\begin{quote}

  
In some cases, a finding of no significant impact does have to be made
  available for public review. Public review means that you have to give
  the public thirty days to look it over before you can even decide whether
  to write an environmental impact statement, and certainly before any action
  is taken. Here are the cases in which you do have to provide the public
  review:

\end{quote}



There. All we need now is to draw little pictures.



The people who write like this write like this simply because they are
the people who write like this. Even when you can convince them that there
is something wrong with what they have written, you cannot make them into
people who wouldn't write like this. If you send them to go and fix it,
you'll get what you deserve --- it's like hoping the termites will build
you a new house out of the glop they have made of your old one.



So the bureaucrats will need help, and lo, help is at hand. The educational
establishment that has provided the problem will come forward to be paid
for the solution. Thus firefighters sometimes set fires so that they can
try out the new pumper. Hosts of advisers and consultants will be added
to bureaucracies of all kinds. New courses of study will appear in the schools
to prepare people for such lucrative and respectable labors. New courses
of study will appear in the teacher-training academies to prepare the teachers
for the teaching of new courses of study that will prepare the advisers
and consultants. New journals of the new study will blossom; new workshops
and conferences will convene from Tacoma to Key West; new federal grants
will support studies that will find new findings. If you had any sense at
all, you'd buy some stock right now.



There is, of course, an alternative to the plain English fad, but it's
almost too dangerous to discuss in public. We could simply decide to educate
all Americans to such a degree that they could read and understand even
the OSHA definition of an exit. We could even educate them well enough so
that they could understand why OSHA has to say things like that and why
it doesn't matter much. We could have the schools devote lots of time, especially
in the early grades, to spelling and vocabulary and even writing so that
the next generation will grow up able to grasp relative clauses and complex
sentences at sight and understand at once the meaning of ``reciprocal''
and ``indemnify'' and even ``mitigate.'' This sounds so
easy and so right that there must be a catch, and indeed there is. When
we consider the inevitable consequences of such a policy, we can see that
it is probably too dangerous to contemplate.



Just think what happens in the mind of the person who knows the difference
between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. Anyone who understands that
distinction is on the brink of seeing the difference between simple fact
and elaborative detail and may well begin to make judgments about the logic
of such relationships. He may start bothering his head about the difference
between things essential and things accidental, a disorder that often leads
to the discovery of tautologies. Furthermore, anyone who sees the difference
between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses is likely to understand why
modifiers should be close to the things they modify and thus begin to develop
a sense of the way in which ideas grow from one another. From that, it's
not a long way to detecting non sequiturs and unstated premises and even
false analogies.



Unfortunately, we just don't know how to teach skillful reading and writing
without developing many undesirable and socially destructive side effects.
Should we raise up a generation of literate Americans, very little of the
America that we know would survive. We depend on a steady background level
of ignorance and stupidity. A skillful reader, for instance, cannot be depended
upon to buy this after-shave rather than some other because he{\bfseries }  is
always weighing and considering statements that just weren't meant to be
weighed and considered. He may capriciously and irresponsibly switch not
only from one after-shave to another but even from one hot comb to another.
Our industries depend on what we call ``brand loyalty,'' and thoughtful
readers will all be brand traitors. They may, even probably will, go the
next step and become brand nihilists who decide not to buy any aftershave
or hot comb at all. It may even occur to them that the arguments for the
ownership of trash compactors and toaster ovens are specious, and then they
won't buy any trash compactors or toaster ovens. Economic chaos will follow.



The next thing you know they'll start listening very carefully to the
words and sentences of the politicians, and they'll decide that there isn't
one of{\bfseries }  them worth voting for anywhere on the ballot. There's no knowing
where this will end. The day will come when a President is elected only
because those few feebleminded citizens who still vote just happened to
bump up against his lever more often than they bumped up against the other
guy's lever. A President, of course, doesn't care how he gets elected, but
he might lose clout among world leaders when they remind him that he owes
his high office to the random twitchings of thirty-seven imbeciles. That
will be the end of network election coverage as we know it.



\chapter{Hydra}



Unfortunately, the plain English movement is probably not the result
of a widespread conspiracy. That's just wishful thinking. It's simply one
more head of the many-headed monster of muddled language and thought. If
there were a conspiracy, it might conceivably be thwarted, but if we cut
off the plain English head, another will grow in its place, and perhaps
a more horrid one.



At one time I thought that I was the victim of a conspiracy myself. I
was certain that the Admissions Office had salted my classes with carefully
selected students, students who had no native tongue. Many of my students
seem unable to express themselves in any language whatsoever. They aren't
utterly mute, of course. They can say something about the weather and give
instructions about how to get to the post office. They are able to recite
numerous slogans, especially from television commercials and the lyrics
of popular songs and recent --- very recent --- political campaigns.
They are able to read traffic signs and many billboards and even some newspapers,
and they can claim certain emotions with regard to various teams and even
individual athletes, whose names they often know. They can spin more or
less predictable reveries about the past or the future either in very simple
concrete terms or in sentimental banalities, or both. But they cannot pursue
a process; they cannot say why evidence leads to a conclusion; they cannot
find examples for analogies. They've never heard of analogies. They speak
and write English as though they were recent immigrants from Bulgaria, whose
Bulgarian itself had been totally obliterated on Ellis Island.



Of course, it was all an illusion, a phantom of wishful thinking. There
was no conspiracy at all. They were just ordinary American students pretty
much like any others. They were the typical product of our schools.



Everyone who has succeeded in learning a foreign language has come to
``think'' in that language, as we say, although we probably mean
something even more complicated than that. Now it seems that there are millions
of Americans who can't think even in English. How is it with them? Do they
plan, or do they merely fantasize? Do they solve problems, or do they simply
rummage around for a suitable slogan? Are they the people Socrates had in
mind in thinking about that unexamined life that wasn't worth living? Can
they examine life?



People in that condition don't think of themselves as being in that condition
because they don't {\bfseries think}  of themselves --- they don't think
at all. To think, we must devise connected chains of predications, which,
in turn, require fluency in language. Those who are fluent in no language
just don't have the means for thinking about things. They may remember and
recite whatever predications experience provides them, but they cannot manipulate
them and derive new ones. Mostly, therefore, they will think and do those
things that the world suggests that they think and do. For some of us, it
must be very important that people in this condition remain in this condition,
for we have obviously devised ways to see to that.



Truncheons are for louts. The great masters of social manipulation use
language. They know, furthermore, that the establishment of a flexible and
subtle language for the ruling classes is only half of what's needed. The
other half is the perpetuation of an ineffective and minimal language among
the subjects. Ordinarily, the second half is assured by man's natural propensity
to bother himself as little as possible, but history occasionally requires
that the rulers take some special pains to preserve the ignorance of their
subjects. Our own recent history provides a splendid example of how this
is done.



The civil rights struggles of the early sixties made it look, for a while,
as though the public schools might, in fact, become integrated someday.
That turned out to be an illusion, of course, but in those days it did seem
possible that millions and millions of poor black children would find themselves
in ``better'' schools, schools where white children (we thought)
were being taught the skills suitable to {\bfseries their}  place in society.
In those days we took out some insurance so that social disorders might
be averted.



America depends on the poor black population of its cities to be always
the same. They are a reactionary's dream, an utterly stable segment of society.
Every year, without fail, they will consume just so much junk, just so many
TV dinners, and just so many pay-by-the-week burial-expense insurance policies.
They will invest a predictable proportion of what little they have in lottery
tickets and patent medicines. They will keep the whole legal system employed
by committing, quite regularly, an ever-growing number of crimes, mostly
against each other, fortunately. Some few of them will always provide a
never-failing pool of utterly unskilled labor to do the necessary scut-work
that underlies the technology that the rest of us can handle. They will
support prodigiously the enormous illegal drug industry and contribute vast
sums to all those along the line who profit from it, very few of whom are
to be seen in the streets of the ghettos. They will buy couches and lamps
and refrigerators of the sleaziest quality on the never-never plan at fantastic
rates of interest. There is simply no counting the benefits they bestow
on the rest of us.



It is a foolish oversimplification to think of poor blacks as wards of
the state supported by the taxes of the middle class. They don't eat that
money. They spend it. It all comes back to {\bfseries some}  of us with
interest. Millions of us have good jobs because of the poor. Millions of
us have good jobs because of criminals and junkies. What would come to pass
with us should we wake up one morning and discover that all the black poor
had vanished in the night? What would America be like? Whatever else we
can say about such an America, we can surely assert that it wouldn't be
like{\bfseries }  this.



Imagine now an event less drastic and by no means impossible, however
unlikely. Imagine that next June should bring us a million --- that's
all, just{\bfseries  one}  million --- black high school graduates who
could speak and write clear, correct, fluent English. Andrew Young and Barbara
Jordan we can handle --- sure --- but a million? That would be the end
of affirmative action as we know it.



A fluent command of English cannot exist as an isolated skill, a clever
stunt. A person who speaks and writes his native tongue clearly and precisely
does so because of many other abilities, and those other abilities themselves
grow stronger through the fluent manipulation of language. The simple matter
of being logical is a function of language. A million high school graduates
capable of fluent English would be a million Americans capable of logical
thought. What would we do with them, especially if they were black? You
think{\bfseries  they're}  going to buy those lottery tickets and lamps
in the shape of Porky Pig? You think they're going to hang out on the corners
and provide employment for everybody from the local social worker to the
justices of the Supreme Court?



Well, don't worry. It's just a bad dream. Next June won't even saddle
us with a million{\bfseries }  white high school graduates who are fluent
in English. That too would be trouble.



Even hypothetical trouble is worth worrying about, however, and in the
sixties the possibility that black children would become literate someday
was at least hypothetical, and, therefore, dangerous. Some unknown genius
somewhere came up with an effective vaccine against black literacy. He contrived
a gimmick that would certainly postpone black literacy for decades and perhaps
forever. Like all truly great inventions, it was simple and obvious, once
we saw it, of course. It was Black English.



To understand how the schools could have embraced something as silly
as Black English, it is necessary to understand something about the people
in those schools. Many of them drifted into teaching because of a disquieting
and usually well-founded suspicion that their talents would not permit them
to find much success as accountants or insurance adjusters. As compensation
for meager ability, they discovered in themselves an abiding love for children,
however horrid or grubby. Some of them found, once in the classroom, that
their love for children was even greater than they had thought, and{\bfseries  they}  became administrators as quickly as possible so that they might
ladle out that love to whole{\bfseries }  schools full of children, even
to whole school{\bfseries  systems}  full of children. In the schools,
rank and honor are accorded to the lovers of children inversely in proportion
to the numbers of children with whom they deal. Those who deal with many
children every day have the lowest rank. Those who deal with only a few
from time to time have higher rank --- and pay. Those who never have any
reason at all even to {\bfseries see}  a child from a distance are general
officers, usually dignified with the title of ``educators.''



All of these people, of whatever rank, rule over children, and some of
them rule over some rulers of children. It is a calling that must cause,
sooner or later, serious self-doubt in all but the most cloddish. That's
why people in the schools will seize with fervor any novelty in pedagogy.
There's no way to measure the effectiveness of a teacher who undertakes
to teach what cannot be measured. If you put yourself forth as a teacher
of arithmetic, you might be embarrassed when it turns out that your students
can't do arithmetic, but when you claim to be teaching Positive Self-Image
--- who's to say? Black English is even safer than Positive Self-Image,
for it doesn't have to be taught at all, merely applauded, and the teachers
who applaud it automatically earn merit as teachers of Positive Self-Image
and even of Intercultural Understanding. Accordingly, Black English, a concept
just about as sensible as Black Arithmetic or Black Botany, swept over the
schools like the impis of Chaka.



We were all feeling guilty in those days, anyway, and Black English seemed
to offer us an opportunity to make up for past inequities and transgressions.
Perfectly sane professors and even deans could be seen going around the
campus in hair dashikis and saying ``right on'' to each other. It
was suddenly revealed to us all that subject-verb agreement was an instrument
of imperialist oppression, and we were deeply ashamed of having expected
it of {\bfseries any}  of our students, whatever their color. We were about
to institute courses in Swahili, but somebody discovered that Swahili grammar
requires that the speaker know how to make careful distinctions in the form
and placement of object and subject pronouns and even requires subject-verb
agreement. It turned out to be just another instrument if imperialist oppression,
and that was the end of Swahili. Besides, it was a foreign import, and we
were all talking about the right to a language of one's own.



Like any argot, Black English can be eloquent and poetic. While it is
not in any sense at all a different {\bfseries language}  from English,
it is in social terms at least what Old English once was to Norman French,
the private talk of the oppressed. It is rich in subtle invective. It provides
vast arrays of synonyms in a few very special subjects, most notably money,
sex, and the enemy. Its extravagant lexicon seems the result partly of a
desire to exclude outsiders and partly of the exuberance of skillful performance.
In the mouth of a fluent speaker it is a powerful incantation. It is, furthermore,
an illustration of the many differences between speech and writing, as anyone
who tries to write discursive prose in Black English will soon discover.



It is only a sentimental populism that can pronounce Black English a
``language'' just as rich and useful as standard Anglo-American
or any other tongue. Had Freud been thinking about language when he told
us that the goose dreams of corn, he would have said also that the goose
{\bfseries speaks}  of corn.



Eskimos have many words for different kinds of snow, just as the Jiukiukwe
have many words for different kinds of tree-bangers. This is, however, obviously
due more to environment than to the nature of their languages. Should the
Eskimos run amok and conquer the world, the time would soon come when only
the oldest grandparents remembered all of that vocabulary. Such special
vocabularies are ordinarily related to matters of intense, even vital, interest.
They can make exceedingly fine distinctions that may, in fact, mean the
difference between killing a fat seal and freezing to death. In like fashion,
although not often against the threat of death, our language offers large,
specialized vocabularies, so that we can assemble whole dictionaries of
terms used in medicine or philosophy or even insurance adjusting.



We think, at first, that Black English, or any argot, shows the same
linguistic complexity, but it doesn't. Like slang anywhere and in any language,
for instance, Black English provides countless words and expressions with
sexual meanings. Here, too, we might assemble whole dictionaries. If we
did, though, we would discover that many of those words, in fact {\bfseries most}  of those words, mean exactly the same thing. If you want to explore
this phenomenon without disconcerting yourself too much, think of money
instead of sex. You'll quickly assemble a splendid array of synonyms, but
that's all they are --- synonyms. They are not specialized terms intended
to make finer and finer distinctions among various possible {\bfseries kinds}  of money. Such vocabularies, furthermore, are always ephemeral,
and if a dictionary of slang is useful, it's useful not because it reveals
fine distinctions but because it explains the bawdy jokes in Shakespeare.
If the snow lexicon of the Eskimos were altered every twenty years or so,
they'd die.



The extensive, specialized vocabularies of slang are clearly not intended
to describe the world of experience more and more precisely. They are, rather,
exuberant outpourings of the joys of word-play, colorful elaborations perfectly
proper to speech and poetry. That's why slang, and especially what we call
Black English, can be so jaunty and rambunctious and pleasing to the ear.
Its metaphors can be subtle and penetrating, and its blithe disregard of
standard grammatical forms is as crafty as it is cocky. Unfortunately, however,
it will not serve us when we want to explain or understand the rationalistic
epistemology that informs constitutional democracy or how birds fly. A child
who comes out of school knowing only Black English will never trouble us
by seeking employment as a professor of political science or as an aerodynamic
engineer.



Here are the unacknowledged assumptions behind the Black English movement
in the schools: Most black kids are too stupid to learn fluent, standard
English. Some few are, perhaps, not too stupid, but to teach them fluent,
standard English is hard work for the teachers. (Some of the teachers are
too stupid to teach fluent, standard English, anyway.) It would be better,
in any case, if they {\bfseries didn't}  learn fluent, standard English,
since we would then have to admit some of them to important and lucrative
professions. Black parents can be calmed into approving this scheme through
appeals to ``ethnic pride,'' which we will also ``teach'' in
the schools just to provide a little extra insurance. We can explain that
spelling and punctuation are devices of racial and economic oppression and
that verb forms that change in the past tense are the result of centuries
of prejudice and intolerance. They'll buy it.



And they did. They still do. Although we don't talk about it much anymore,
the Black English mania has not gone away. It has even been reinforced with
Bilingual Education, another mania with many similar unspoken assumptions.
When we look around the country and see that schoolchildren are more ignorant
than ever, and that black schoolchildren are ordinarily the most ignorant,
we are inclined to think that something has failed. That is a naive conclusion.
In fact, something has succeeded.



\chapter{The Turkeys that Lay the Golden Eggs}



Consider P. (That's not his real name, of course; his real name is Legion.)
He is a member of the most elaborate and successful bureaucracy since the
days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Is there a Kafka hidden away in one
of its back offices? Maybe, but he surely isn't P. P's prose is somewhat
less interesting than K's, although it does have one unusual quality that
Kafka never managed to achieve. While Kafka {\bfseries can}  be translated
into English, P cannot:


\begin{quote}

  
Our program is designed to enhance the concept of an open-ended learning
  program with emphasis on a continuum of multi-ethnic, academically enriched
  learning using the identified intellectually gifted child as the agent
  or director of his own learning. Major emphasis is on cross-graded, multi-ethnic
  learning with the main objective being to learn respect for the uniqueness
  of a person.

\end{quote}



Blot out all thought of trying to figure out what he means --- it doesn't
matter. Concentrate on P as a {\bfseries person},  or even as the uniqueness
of a person.



We already know a lot about P, because we have seen similar productions
turned out by many of his ilk. He is one of those educationist types, no
longer a teacher, if he ever was one, but a permanent bureaucrat, one whose{\bfseries 
} love of children has excused him from their {\bfseries presence}  as
persons so that he may respect their uniquenesses as persons. We can be
sure that he knows and uses, perhaps even thinks that he understands, all
the typical jargon of his calling. We can guess that he has taken many courses
in pedagogy and academic administration and that he knows all about guidelines
and curricula and what the studies have shown. His writing suggests also
certain personal qualities. It is pompous and self-important, intended to
impress the reader with the skill and erudition of the writer. Most of it,
moreover, seems to be taken from ``the literature,'' that is, the
utterances and pronouncements of all the other P's. Because we can't tell
if there is any thought in what he says, we obviously can't tell if there
is any {\bfseries original}  thought in what he says, and we can only guess
that there probably isn't. Let's guess that, by all means. All right ---
that's enough. We have a fairly good picture of P.



Now ask: Is P unusual? That seems unlikely. We find so many examples
of P-ness, especially in the administrators of the schools, that we have
to guess that there are many like P, hordes of them, in fact. They are the
people who sit around sending each other pieces of prose like the one above.
They take them seriously. They are the people in charge of education. Politicians
come and go, but these educationistic bureaucrats are permanently bedded
down in secure bureaucracies and protected from criticism by the opacity
of their words and their claim to an expertise that you and I cannot possibly
hope to understand. They will make the future.



Go back now to politicians, more P's, come to think of it. Although politicians
do come and go, they are able to do much mischief during their brief tenure.
As you saw in that business of ``simplified'' English, politicians
especially love issues that can't possibly hurt them. Nowadays, they have
discovered the turkeys that lay the golden eggs in our educational disorders.
Because few people can read anything much more complicated than the instructions
on the child-proof caps, the politicians can without risk espouse the cause
of simplification. For the same reason, that is, because it is without risk,
they can advocate improved teaching of reading in the schools.



If we really believed that the reading of schoolchildren could be improved,
then we wouldn't need to worry about simplifying all our contracts and regulations,
of course. But to politicians a little contradiction like that doesn't matter.
What matters is that they take a stand in favor of good and against evil.
Accordingly, in state after state, legislators are making laws intended
to ensure what is now called a minimum competence in all high school graduates.
It's a popular cause, and many reasonable people have been tricked into
supporting it. Only a yahoo would attack it, it seems. Nevertheless, it
is a very bad idea for the future of literacy, and, when combined with the
simplification madness, it assures a never-failing supply of docile voters
and mindless consumers. It assures also, like the Black English mania, that
the technological skills of the future will be concentrated in the hands
of fewer and fewer people. For those people, that's good.



Here's how the process goes. Politicians begin to notice that the citizens
have been worked up about declining literacy. After asking around, they
discover that there's hardly anyone who will come out {\bfseries against}  literacy,
so they decide to do the virtuous thing however difficult and politically
dangerous. They say: Enough! Our high schools must prepare every citizen
and voter to cope with the world. No more social promotion! No more functional
illiterates! Freedom of opportunity for all! And the people applaud.



What next? Tests, of course. We will give tests to those students, and
those who can't pass can't graduate. What could be more logical? And how
will we make those tests? We'll go to the professionals, the educators,
the people who have been sending all of those illiterates out into the world,
the people who caused this problem in the first place. They have by now
surely mended their ways; even they have come out in favor of literacy.
It's a great new day for education and freedom and politics in general.



Here is what happens down at the bitter end of the process. Don't forget
P, the chap who wrote that stuff about the cross-graded multi-ethnic learning.
He and his friends are the ones who will figure out how to measure literacy.
Who else is there to do it? The legislators are a little short on literacy
themselves, and P and company have all kinds of certificates and diplomas,
to say nothing of a well-established bureaucracy and the secret lodge language.
They are the people to whom the legislators turn. P and his pals will ``devise
instruments'' to guarantee minimal competence in reading and writing
in all high school graduates.



As horrifying as that is in theory, it's much worse in practice. It means
that P will end up giving tests in which literacy is measured by a student's
ability to choose between ``who'' and ``whom'' and to put
a colon after ``Dear Congressman:'' Now {\bfseries that}  is the
kind of stuff that P knows how to measure. {\bfseries He}  probably does
know the difference between ``who'' and ``whom,'' and very
probably can even say, after only a moment's reflection, hard things like
``just between him and us.'' Judging from the passage cited, we
may even conclude that he has some control of commas and understands at
least one use of capitalization. If those are the kinds of things that constitute
literacy, however, then it's hardly worth fussing about. Knowing those things
obviously hasn't helped P at all. If we really mean to stamp out illiteracy,
then we're going to have to start by stamping out P.



Indubitably, the literate person is familiar with the conventions of
``correct'' English and can use them or even fool around with them
as he chooses. Knowing the difference between ``who'' and ``whom''
is like knowing how to finger scales; the one doesn't make you literate
and the other doesn't make you a musician. The writer who {\bfseries doesn't}  know the difference between ``who'' and ``whom,''
like the musician who doesn't know how to finger scales, had better have
one hell of a lot of talent. There are such people. They are amazing, but
they are not produced by schooling. Such people, in fact, ought to stay
away from schools and protect their talents. The ordinary student has little
if any talent, and if he is to become literate he will need to know all
the mechanical trivia we can teach him. That, however, will not make him
literate.



The literate person is in control of those techniques special to writing
rather than to speech. He can formulate sentences that make sense. He can
choose the right word from an array of similar words. He can devise the
structures that show how things and statements about things are related
to one another. He can generate strings of sentences that develop logically
related thoughts, and arrange them in such a way as to make that logic clear
to others. He can make analogies and define classes. He can, in writing,
discover thought and make knowledge. Because he can do these things, he
can, in reading, determine whether or not someone else can do these things.
He is familiar with a technology of thinking. To accept anything less as
our definition of literacy is to admit that hardly any of us will ever be
able to think about anything. That may be true, but to admit it is to assure
it.



P is illiterate. He cannot do those things. Wait. Maybe he {\bfseries can}  do those things but for some reasons of his own chooses not to.
In that case, he is worse than illiterate; he is depraved. Let's give him
the benefit of the doubt and say that he is {\bfseries merely}  illiterate.
When we realize that, we also realize that ``minimum'' is the important
word in the ``minimum competence'' game. P is going to set some
standards having to do with things like ``who'' and ``whom.''
He'll call them, naturally, behavioral objectives. He'll devise some instruments
to measure the behaviors. The teachers will teach the students the ``who''
and ``whom'' business, along with colons, maybe. The students will
take the tests. A number of them, perhaps lots of them, will ``pass.''
Behold. A minimum competence in literacy will have been achieved. Legislators
and educationists will shake each other by the hand. The former will be
reelected; the latter will be promoted. The citizenry of America will be
enriched by millions of high school graduates who now know the difference
between ``who'' and ``whom.''



The minimum competence school of education is nothing new. We've had
it for many years, but we didn't talk about it until we discovered that
we could make a virtue of it. Obviously, any system of schooling in which there are tests and passing grades is a sort of minimum competence system
--- if you pass, you pass; but that's not exactly how the minimum competence
system is now construed. Now we try to find out just how little we can get
by with and pronounce it enough. The current crisis is simply the result
of a disagreement as to how little is enough. The school people want it
to be as little as possible, and the politicians want it to be just enough
to convince the citizens that something{\bfseries  has}  been done, and
somewhere in the middle they will meet and compromise. In some states now
it is enough if high school seniors can read and write like the eighth graders
of another age, but in other more demanding states it is necessary for high
school seniors to read and write like the tenth graders of another age.
States' rights, you know.



In effect, the minimum competence movement will simply assure that millions
of American students will take just a little longer to reach that degree
of incompetence that we can now expect in the ordinary high school graduate.
This, in turn, will mean that it will take just a little bit longer for
millions of American students to reach that degree of incompetence that
we can now expect in the ordinary college graduate. This, in its turn, will
keep graduates of both high schools and colleges out of the job market a
bit longer. Unemployment will decline because those who might have looked
for work are still busy wrestling with ``who'' and ``whom.''
Educationists will point with pride to their new ``rigorous'' programs,
and politicians will point with pride to the efficaciousness of their economical
policies. America will prosper.



That's not all. The educationist establishment will wax fat with the
addition of diagnosticians and remediationalists and devisers of instruments
and coordinators of curricula and directors of programs and all of the supporting
services and paraphernalia that must go with all of those things. The teacher
corps will grow, and teachers will demand and get more money for the arduous
increased labor involved in teaching the advanced skills of fourth-grade
reading and writing to sixth-grade students. Everyone will profit. Well,
perhaps not everyone.



Here is someone who won't. This poor fellow went to high school not too
long ago. Then, even more recently, he went to college. His major was political
science, his minor, sociology. In his major, his grade average was B plus,
in his minor, B. These grades used to mean a better than average student;
now they mean an average student, except, of course, in education courses,
where such low grades are uncommon. This poor chap's name is also Legion.
He's your standard model college graduate. Now he needs a job, and here
he is, applying for a modest enough position in the world of free, private
enterprise:


\begin{quote}

  
Dear Sir:
  I am seeking a job as an insurance adjuster; and it is with this in mind
  that I am writing to you and your company. I first became interested in
  an insurance adjuster job through my best friend. He is an insurance adjuster
  with a large national company. After having talked to him I have decided
  that an insurance adjuster job is the type of job and career that I would
  enjoy. I sought placement with the company that he works for, however at
  this time they were unable to find placement for me with their company;
  and as I am very interested in becoming an insurance adjuster I have decided
  to seek placement with other insurance companies. My first approach to
  trying to find placement with other insurance companies was to go to a
  personnel agency which had listed several adjuster positions that they
  had. However after having visited a personnel agency I decided that they
  were not the best approach in trying to find placement with other insurance
  companies. Therefore, my second approach and the one that I am using now
  is to send a letter with my personal resume to all the insurance companies
  operating in the state of North Carolina, stating that I am seeking placement
  with their company as an insurance adjuster. After you have read my letter
  and studied my personal resume, if you and your company have an opening
  within your company for an insurance adjuster and are interested in me
  as a candidate for the position, I would be very interested in talking
  to you.

\end{quote}



What will become of him? Do you think that he can make it as an insurance
adjuster? Do you think anyone will give him a chance to try? Would {\bfseries you} ?
His writing is not fraudulent like P's; it's merely pathetic. We can easily
imagine hours of bafflement and pencil-chewing, the unsuccessful struggle
to answer the demands of an unfamiliar technology. His letter is awkward
and inept, like a child's gift of a pencil pot made of Popsicle sticks glued
around a soup can, and every bit as revealing of what P would probably call
``the uniqueness of a person.'' That is, not at all. Nevertheless,
this poor boy is what our schools have called minimally competent at the
very least, and so he will be for the rest of his sad and meager life. Some
useless but interesting questions arise. How much reading did he do as a
student of political science and sociology, disciplines not noted for a
lack of discursive and theoretical prose? What makes him think that this
is how writing is supposed to go? What did his professors say about his
writing? Was it with discursive prose like this that he earned his good
grades? The questions are useless, of course, because the answers are obvious.
Again and again, for all those years of his education, someone said of his
skill, ``What the hell, it'll do.'' To require anything more of
him would have been just too much trouble. Nevertheless, he's one of our
successes. Just try to imagine the failures.



\chapter{Devices and Desires}



Individual failures will eventually disappear into the morass of the
barely educated and barely employable, but corporate failures seem immortal.
It is only the failures of the past that the ignorant are condemned to repeat;
the successes they are condemned to forget. We are not the first to speak
nonsense and to teach it.



When Gulliver went among the Projectors of Lagado, he met some remarkable
chaps who were silly linguists but astute prophets. They were looking for
a way to escape the constraints of language, and they undertook to do away
with words entirely. Since words were, they thought, only names for things,
they reasoned that we'd all be better off if we went right to the heart
of reality and dealt in the things themselves rather than in the words.
They proposed that we might simply carry about with us whatever things might
be needful for the conduct of our business. Gulliver had the chance to watch
some of them in conversation, setting down their great bundles, pulling
forth objects, and holding them up for each other's scrutiny. It's entertaining
to imagine them, showing each other egg cups and wrenches and bobby pins
and worn-out shoes.



Unfortunately, their noble plan was undone by a coalition of ``Women
in Conjunction with the Vulgar and the Illiterate,'' who {\bfseries will}  be pattering in all seasons, and who are always ``irreconcilable
Enemies to Science.'' What a pity. Where are those savants now that
we need them? Just imagine the benefits that would flow from such a system.
Think of the Gross National Product. Think of the factories churning out
things, enough things so that every citizen could have a large enough vocabulary
to get him through a whole life. Every little child playing on the sidewalks
would need at least a large backpack full of stuff. Businessmen would wheel
large pushcarts into posh restaurants, and wheeling and dealing would no
longer be a metaphor. Scholars would attend conferences in Peoria trailing
behind them U-Haul vans full of objects. Yankee ingenuity would quickly
provide miniatures of everything imaginable, so that before long you'd be
able to discuss the foreign policy of the Carter administration out of one
pocket and still have room in another to chat about the weather and complain
about inflation. Blissful silence would fall upon the land as people everywhere
displayed to each other forks and carburetors and delicate underthings and
adorable little models of the Supreme Court Building. Television talk shows
would become fascinating exercises in inventiveness, and people would probably
buy tickets to watch the chairman of the Federal Reserve trying to explain
the rise in the prime rate.



Well, we, of course, are not as silly as the Projectors of Lagado. We
are devising far more practical ways to escape the constraints of language.
Our substitutes for the logical demands of discursive prose are more subtle,
and we have even overcome the traditional enmity of the ``Women in Conjunction
with the Vulgar and the Illiterate.'' The women have been convinced
that the mastery of discursive prose must wait upon the invention of some
new pronouns; the vulgar have been convinced that precision in language
is subservience to elitist oppression; and we are now working on ways to
convince the illiterate that they're actually better off just watching television.



A contempt of book-learning is not new in America. From some point of
view it's even desirable. Those who rule a society and direct its course
and devise its laws and control its wealth do so out of certain skills.
Our Madisons and Hamiltons and Jeffersons were book-learners. Out of the
power of words, they formed a nation to suit their needs, and out of that
same power, they governed it. Out of the inescapable implications of their
words, they imagined and projected a nation of educated citizens, book-learners,
unto whose informed discretion the ultimate authority was to be given. Or
so they said. So {\bfseries we}  say. They may have meant it; we don't.



For those who have the power of language, it is a comfort to know that
so many others don't. While we keep the powers and privileges that go with
skill in language, we are happy to leave the ignorant in what they proudly
call the school of hard knocks, sweeping our floors and bruising their knuckles
with wrenches. By all means, let them despise book-learning. What do we
need with competitors? Book-learning can only lead the multitudes into the
ways of knowledge and logical thought, which will make them discontented
laborers, undependable voters, and finicky consumers.



Those who can profit from a general anti-intellectualism are the intellectuals,
and those who reap the benefits of widespread illiteracy are the literate.
The Projectors of Lagado might have succeeded magnificently if they had
thought of that. Unfortunately, they took themselves seriously. It's a silly
quack who swallows his own snake oil. We are making the same mistake in
our academies of projectors. It's one thing to encourage in the ignorant
the notion that book-learning is silly and that they don't want any part
of it; it's quite another when the book-learners themselves fall for that
story.



Here are the words of one of our contemporary projectors. His very title
is subtle projection; he is called Learning Resources Center Director. A
Learning Resources Center is what we used to call a library, but a library
sounds like a dull and solemn place ruled over by scowling spinsters. A
Learning Resources Center sounds like a bright and cheery place, shiny with
Naugahyde and Formica, where you can get something or other serviced by
a smiling attendant. Librarians, furthermore, make us think of books, but
Learning Resources Centrists can provide us with filmstrips and 8-track
recordings and show us how to work the machines. This particular centrist
has concluded that too much fuss is being made about reading and writing
and adduces, to support his conclusion, the fact that some films are beautiful
and that cassette recorders are very useful for learning foreign languages
while driving cars. He says:


\begin{quote}

  
More and more colleges and universities in America are admitting students
  who do not read well, yet most of these same students have a high degree
  of visual literacy. They have gained knowledge and understanding through
  years of exposure to television, films and other image-oriented media.
  Is the knowledge of these students inferior in quality to the knowledge
  of their peers who are avid readers?

\end{quote}



It would be some comfort to believe that this centrist knew what he was
doing. If that were so, we could conclude that he has bought up lots of
stock in the electronics industry and that his interesting assertions about
gaining knowledge and understanding were designed to increase the sales
of video recorders and those cunning devices that permit us to play billiards
and blackjack on the screen. Such entertainments must surely provide knowledge
and understanding about angles of incidence and reflection and about addition,
at least up to twenty-one. Furthermore, if we could be convinced of his
astuteness, we could ourselves call our brokers and place a few orders.
Unfortunately, however, his language shows us that he has swallowed his
own snake oil and that he is not one of the deceivers, whom we would gladly
join, but one of the deceived, whom we would like to fleece.



If you cannot be the master of your language, you must be its slave.
If you cannot examine your thoughts, you have no choice but to think them,
however silly they may be. Had this centrist stopped to examine his language
he would have found himself examining his thoughts, and he would have found
that they are nonsense. Having bought his own scam, however, he is precluded
from such an examination. We are not.



Look first at his reference to ``image-oriented media,'' a modern
and trendy term. We know, of course, what ``oriented'' means, even
when it appears in the Illustrated Guide to the Learning Resources Center
as ``orientated.'' If you're oriented, you know which way is east.
That much, however, would be of little help to a Bulgarian trying to learn
English. He'll be told someday that some people are ``print-oriented.''
Now that does not mean that those people know which way to go to find some
print; it means rather that they find print somehow more informative than
other things and that they're likely to pay more attention to it than they
do even to color pictures of pretty girls with big teeth. While our poor
Bulgarian is still trying to decide whether to believe that, he'll hear
about something that's ``consumer-oriented.'' He now has to face
the hard fact that his understanding of ``oriented,'' even coupled
with his understanding of ``print-oriented,'' won't help him with
``consumer-oriented.'' To be ``consumer-oriented'' does
not mean knowing which way to go to find the nearest consumer. It does not
mean being more attuned to consumers than to other forms of humanity, misers,
for instance. ``Consumer-oriented,'' in fact, can't even be used
to describe persons. It goes with whole bureaucracies, maybe, or campaigns,
or those little feature items on the women's page in the Sunday paper that
are intended to be for the {\bfseries benefit}  of consumers.



Once our Bulgarian has learned about ``consumer-oriented,'' he
can go on to tackle something like ``success-oriented,'' which does
{\bfseries not}  mean knowing which way success lies, and does {\bfseries not}  mean
more likely to be informed by success than by anything else, and does {\bfseries not}  mean providing aid and comfort to success, but {\bfseries does}  mean
being impelled in the direction of success. By analogy with ``success-oriented,''
you can say that bombs and bullets are enemy-oriented. But maybe not. ``Enemy-oriented''
might also mean ``designed to serve the needs of the enemy.'' So
be careful.



(This is the final test for jargon: How far can it be pushed? When that
provost told us that his process was made up of components, elements, and
factors, we might have been taken in. If we push his jargon far enough and
put it into something concrete, like a bologna, for instance, we see that
he would have to say that components, elements, and factors were actually
the same as slices.)



Having been through all that, can we now understand what he means by
the ``image-oriented media''? Let's try it with television, which
is, by the centrist's admission, one of those media. Does he mean to say
that television is pointed in the direction of images and knows how to find
them? Does he mean that television seems most comfortable when looking at
images? Does he mean that television is an enterprise devoted to the welfare
of images? Does he mean that television is motivated by images? Obviously,
all of these possibilities are nonsensical. He can only mean that television
shows images. That we all knew.



In some ways, being unable to write is like being unable to lie. Evidence
betrays the thousands, but ineptitude unmasks the millions. Having caught
our centrist in the inanity of ``image-oriented media,'' we have reason
to seek out the inanity in ``visual literacy'' and in that supposed
knowledge and understanding that come from long exposure to those ``image-oriented
media.''



Visual literacy. That must be something that comes from looking at images.
But wait. The whole universe is an ``image-oriented medium.'' The
earth and the sea and the sky and all things everywhere show us images.
Alexander the Great saw images all his life; what need had he, then, of
Aristotle? Was Ethelred the Unready visually literate through long years
of exposure to the world? Or can this visual literacy arise only in those
who watch films and television? Must an image be framed in some way before
it can produce knowledge and understanding? Are we to believe that a college
freshman has ``gained'' as much knowledge and understanding from
watching ``Mod Squad'' as Galileo from watching the moon? Does the
growth of visual literacy require alternating current?



One picture is {\bfseries not}  worth a thousand words. A picture isn't
{\bfseries worth}  any words at all. One picture, one glimpse of the moon,
even one episode of ``Mod Squad,'' may {\bfseries cause}  a thousand
words in some beholder. Or many thousand. Or, in some other beholder, none
at all. If knowledge and understanding are to come from watching ``Mod
Squad'' or the moon, they must come in the form of language, the only
vehicle we have for knowledge and understanding. Those unfortunate students
``who do not read well'' may look forever at the moon and have nothing
to say, for they have not the power of language, which is why they do not
read well. They may have taken something or other from their years of film-
and television-watching, but it isn't likely to be knowledge and understanding.
Furthermore, whatever knowledge and understanding they found that way came
not from the{\bfseries  images}  they saw but from some {\bfseries words}  they
might have heard. How many of them, do you suppose, were sufficiently ``image-oriented''
to watch fifteen years of television with the sound turned off?



Let us hope, charitably, that this Learning Resources Center Director
never has to fly to a conference in Denver on an airplane designed by a
bunch of engineers who ``do not read well'' but who have, nevertheless,
``a high degree of visual literacy.'' His best hope would be that
``visual literacy'' is the ability to {\bfseries see}  and {\bfseries identify}  the letters of the alphabet. That, at least, would be some comfort,
for it would suggest that the designers of his airplane might have managed
to identify slot A and tab A correctly. That way, a bunch of mechanics,
also poor readers but visually literate, might just possibly have been able
to slip the latter into the former correctly so that the machine will fly
for a while.



The centrist asks: ``Are colleges and universities routinely to flunk
out students who do not learn well from verbally-oriented instruction?''
(There's another ``oriented,'' attached this time not to a noun
but to an adverb. You'll have to figure that one out for yourself. ) And
those who can't swim --- must they routinely drown when they wander into
deep water? And the blind --- must they be routinely deprived of driver's
licenses?



Of course, the centrist's question isn't quite that simple. The answer
depends on just what it is the colleges and universities intend to teach.
If they are teaching knowledge and understanding, then it looks bad for
those ``who do not learn well from verbally-oriented instruction.''
If they are teaching something else, something which must be utterly inexpressible
in language, we have to wonder how they know whether any of the students
have learned it. The centrist must want his question answered with the assurance
that colleges and universities will routinely {\bfseries graduate}  ``students
who do not learn well from verbally-oriented instruction,'' and that,
of course, is exactly what they do. Many of these students become teachers,
who will provide a never-failing supply of ``students who do not learn
well from verbally-oriented instruction,'' so that the centrists of
the future will always have a good cause to plead.



The Projectors of Lagado would be delighted with ``visual literacy.''
They didn't have such a nifty name for it, but it's just what they had in
mind. After all, when the pretty lady next to you at a dinner party holds
up for your consideration a slightly worn head gasket, you do have to be
image-oriented enough to {\itshape see} what the damned thing is. You do have
to have gained lots of knowledge and understanding in order to respond appropriately
by showing her a ticket stub and a bent paper clip. Now{\bfseries  that's}  communication.



All the zany notions that have corrupted education in the last few decades
have some interesting things in common. They have all arisen as education's
responses to deficiencies caused by education, and they all promise profit
and comfort; the profit to the education industry and the comfort to students
and teachers who are given less and less hard work to do. To read a book
about geology is tiresome, especially to the unverbally-oriented, or verbally-disoriented,
or whatever they are. To watch a little film that shows some sleek cattle
grazing within a few yards of the San Andreas Fault is relaxing and humanistic.
Furthermore, how much can a geology book cost? Twelve, fifteen dollars at
the most. Even a dinky little filmstrip projector costs about ten times
as much, and a motion-picture projector, with stereo sound lest the lowing
of the cows be dehumanized, costs several hundreds at least. A test on the
geology book might present some annoying difficulties, especially for students
who aren't too good at reading or writing; but a test on the film would
require only that the student admit to having noticed the cows. For a little
extra credit, he might assert that the film was handsome and that he appreciated
it. As for the teacher, he too is excused from boring reading, although
he does have to learn to operate the projector. No problem, that. Schools
of teacher training offer numerous courses in the operation of the machines
that have transformed libraries into Leaming Resources Centers.



We are told, of course, that film projectors and video recorders
and tape machines and all such devices are meant not to replace the printed
word but to serve as enlightening adjuncts to books. They certainly can
do that. The Leaming Resources Center Director, however, doesn't seem to
be saying any such thing. He is clearly saying not that students can watch
television and film as illustrations to their studies, but that for some
students television and films must {\bfseries be}  their study. That would
be happy news for the industries that manufacture all those gimmicks.



Those industries will surely have their own motives for encouraging the
cause of visual literacy, but we cannot ascribe such crass motives to the
educators. Their motives are far less canny, and they arise from a pathetic
populism dictated by a sad necessity. This is America, where every child
can hope to grow up to be President, or at least a well-paid geologist,
say. Imagine an only moderately stupid young man who actually watches ``Nova''
and thirsts to explore for oil in the service of Exxon. Should he be barred
from a respectable trade and deprived of a comfortable income just because
he can't read or write or cipher very well? It seems un-American, somehow,
that his opportunities should be limited by his abilities. Let's at least
give him a chance by showing him some pretty pictures of the walls of the
Grand Canyon. We might even get in some actual {\bfseries oil}  and let him smell
it and play with it, thus making him not only visually literate but olfactorily
and tactilely literate as well. Then we'll graduate him with a degree in
geology and let Exxon handle the problem.



The narrow-eyed people at Exxon are, of course, unreconstructed elitists
who expect that geologists can read and write and cipher, but that's{\bfseries 
their}  problem. We are humanistic educators who want everybody
to have a chance at everything, and we're not going to be a party to the
ruthless elitism of the international energy cartels. And as for the unlucky
geology major, currently polishing hubcaps down at the car wash, well, maybe
we can talk him into coming back and putting in a couple of years taking
courses in education. Then we can get him a certificate as a general science
teacher. He ought to be good at showing films and passing around oil. Kids
love that kind of thing.



Imagine something even worse: Maybe, just maybe, that poor geology major
{\bfseries wasn't}  moderately stupid when he started school. After all,
what makes him moderately stupid just now is that he is not at home in the
systems by which we express and devise knowledge and meaning. He just can't
read and write very well. Is his stupidity innate, or was he given it by
a shabby education? Did he fall into the hands of that third-grade teacher
and all the others like her? Did{\bfseries  his}  general science teacher
pass around a can of oil? Were {\bfseries his}  teachers humanistically
attuned to the wonders of visual literacy and all that knowledge and understanding
to be gained from years of exposure to films and television?



The devices of our loony Projectors are designed to satisfy their own
desires. They want to be nice to everybody. They want to be loved. They
want to love their work, which is hard to do when the work is demanding
and difficult. Having long taught out of these desires, they have raised
up to themselves --- and to us, worse luck-far more stupid students than
Nature would have provided on her own. Now, not oblivious to the plight
of these stupid millions, they still want to be nice and, especially, democratic.
They want to provide a make-believe education for the unhappy multitudes
for whom they have already provided the stupidity that fits them for nothing
more than a make-believe education.



It is as though the right hand of Detroit should lose its cunning and
could produce very few automobiles that would actually start, telling us,
however, that we would be far better off sitting in our cars in the driveway
and playing with the knobs.



And here we sit, pulling on the knobs and twiddling the dials, playing
car. The knobs and dials are not connected to anything but it's lots of
fun. Nevertheless, this damned thing will never run, and if we want to go
anywhere we're going to have to connect these knobs and dials to the machinery.
The machinery is there. The language is intact; we're just not hooked up
to it.



\chapter{Naming and Telling}



There is nothing wrong with English. We do not live in the twilight of
a dying language. To say that our English is outmoded or corrupted makes
as much sense as to say that multiplication has been outmoded by Texas Instruments
and corrupted because we've all forgotten the times table. You may say as
often as you please that six times seven is forty-five, but arithmetic will
not suffer. You, of course, may suffer, and, if you happen to be an aerospace
engineer, lots of other people may suffer when your machinery falls into
the downtown section of Detroit, but it won't be because of the decay of
arithmetic. Those thousands of dead and maimed will not be the victims of
a decline in the art of mathematics but simply of ignorance and stupidity,
ignorance and stupidity that might have been prevented had you learned to
manipulate a system of symbols. If it seems to you that an equivalent error
in the symbol system of English can't{\bfseries }  possibly destroy Detroit, then
good luck.



A symbol system that just sits there is no good at all. To learn things,
to understand and to predict, we have to manipulate it. The better we manipulate
it, the more hope there is for Detroit. No matter how badly we manipulate
it, however, it remains what it is --- a way of making knowledge and understanding.
What is thought to be a decay of English in our time is, in fact, a decay
in the brains of those who have not learned to manipulate English. Worms
have made their homes in our brains and have eaten away the power of our
speech and of our thought. Some highly specialized worms have here and there
eaten away the active voice or the prepositional phrase, but the greatest
worm of all, the Master Worm, is gnawing away at the Central Control Board,
the mechanism that makes language something more than the sum of its parts,
the mechanism that links naming and telling.



Consider again that provost who speaks of the elements of the process,
and the components of the process, and the factors of the process. He is,
of course, being thoughtless and lazy. He is using some more or less right-sounding
words to conceal, mostly from himself, the fact that he hasn't thought something
out. He just doesn't {\bfseries know}  exactly how to cut up that process
and how its various parts are to be related to one another. He is covering
the holes in his brain with little slabs of jargon. He has chosen some faddish
terms to conceal his failure of thought, but for all the understanding they
provide he might just as well have spoken of the segments of the process,
or its units, or its compartments. Had he had more time for reflection,
we can suspect that he would have spoken of its {\bfseries essential}  elements,
its{\bfseries  integral}  components, and its factors {\bfseries to be}  considered.



There are plenty of people, most of them in important positions, who
write and think like that, covering an emptiness in the brain with jargon.
How does that come to pass? The answer is portentous.



It is a special richness of English that it provides its speakers with
many long lists of words that mean {\bfseries nearly}  the same thing.
Consider the provost's words: element, component, and factor. They all point
to a {\bfseries part}  of something. So too do the hypothetical alternatives:
segment, unit, compartment. In about two minutes, you should be able to
think up eight or nine more words that mean, roughly, a part of something.
But only roughly.



In slangs, there are large arrays of synonyms that {\bfseries do}  mean
the same thing, because slang is exuberant and poetic. Discursive prose,
unfortunately, must be usually sober and precise. Its large arrays of synonyms
are designed to provide many slightly different meanings and, accordingly,
finer and finer distinctions. To make finer and still finer distinctions
is a proper goal of thought. It is the equivalent of making finer and still
finer measurements in technology. There is an important difference, however.
The fine measurements of technology refer to the world then and there, the
world of physical experience; the fine distinctions of language refer to
a world that is not{\bfseries  there}  in the same sense, but to a world
devised in the mind, a world of imaginative construction.



Wouldn't it be interesting to know {\bfseries exactly}  what the provost means
by elements, components, and factors? Well, not really; he probably doesn't
have any clear idea of what he means. But suppose he did. Then he would
be able to explain to us why{\bfseries  this}  part of the process is best
understood as component while{\bfseries  that}  part must be called an
element. He would make it clear that the factors of the process are subtly
different from the elements and components, and we would behold in wonder
an elegant and elaborate construction of the mind of man, a construction
that might be useful. But that's not going to happen. In fact, those words,
as the provost uses them, are precisely analogous to the synonym lists of
slang. Where slang provides a host of colorful names for private parts,
the jargon of the provost provides a host of insipid names for any old parts
at all. He is reciting a kind of drab doggerel when he pretends to be pursuing
thought in discourse.



The business of language is twofold; it is for naming and for telling.
Those things are not related to each other in exactly the same way. Telling
requires naming, but naming does not require telling. Naming by itself is
of little use. Remember the lion in the grass who needs no name. We can,
of course, sit around and say to each other the names of nearby things,
but that would be an idiotic enterprise suitable for nothing more important
than passing the time on a long automobile ride. Speaking our language is
not an essay in naming. Speaking our language is a matter of telling, naming
things and making propositions about them, which is in effect the arranging
of names in such a way as to present for the mind an order of things that
is {\bfseries not}  present in the arrangement of things around us. Even words
like ``when'' and ``late'' are ``names'' of a sort,
but they name relationships and ideas that have no concrete existence in
the physical world. Two things, then, are necessary for intelligent discourse:
an array of names, and a conventional system for telling. The power of a
language is related, therefore, to the size and subtlety of its lexicon,
its bank of names, and the flexibility and accuracy of its telling system,
its grammar. In these respects, English is a tremendously powerful language,
and those who know it can do great things and create knowledge and
understanding. The trouble with that provost and all the others we have
looked at is not that they have corrupted the English language, but that
in the fullest sense they don't write the English language. Their naming
is insufficient and inaccurate, and their telling is ambiguous and irregular.



In a very complicated culture like ours, there are many things that require
extremely precise naming. Even in much simpler cultures there will always
be {\bfseries some}  things that require the same. The Eskimos, you will recall,
have names for many different kinds of snow, and the Jiukiukwe have names
for stones of different shapes. Such distinctions are important parts of
their technologies. It seems unlikely, however, that the Eskimos have to
devise a complicated set of names for those little tunnels that serve as
doorways to their igloos, and the Jiukiukwe, who have no structures at all,
need no name for a doorway. Our culture is so complicated that even as simple
a thing as a doorway can be an issue in an elaborate technology. That's
the reason for that grotesque definition of an exit on
page 143. The law is one of our linguistic technologies, and in this
case the demands of the law are for precise, complete, and unambiguous meaning.
To read such a definition, of course, is no fun, but it isn't really meant
to be read. It isn't strictly a piece of writing at all. It isn't ``telling''
either; it's only a very fussy naming, an extended entry in some imaginable
index of special names for special occasions.



Our endless need for new and precise names certainly complicates our
language, but such complication doesn't have to cause inanity however much
purists may deplore it. Think of the recent adventures of a popular word,
``incentive.'' This word was once a neologism and probably repellent
to some, but we have learned to live with it. In fact, we have come to need
it, because it makes a precise distinction. To have an incentive is not
only to have a reason for doing something, but more specifically to have
some hope of profit or advantage from the doing. Indeed, the incentive{\bfseries 
is}  often the profit or advantage. ``Incentive,'' therefore,
is not exactly interchangeable with ``motive'' or ``inducement''
or ``encouragement,'' for instance. So what are we to think about
a congressman from Pennsylvania who claims to be proud of having invented
the word ``incentivize,'' by which he means, of course, ``to
provide with an incentive''? If you think he has corrupted the English
language, try to find a {\bfseries precise}  equivalent, a more traditional naming
of exactly that action. To our ears, his word may be ugly, but ``incentive''
itself was once ugly to the English ear. If ``incentivize'' names
an action that cannot, in fact, be otherwise named, we'll learn to live
with it.



In the next chapter of the adventures of ``incentive,'' we hear
our Social Security Director speaking of ``disincentives'' to early
retirement. Any right-thinking person recoils in dismay from this hideous
word, but a little reflection suggests that it may not be easily replaced
with something more familiar. For instance, would ``discouragement''
do the same job? Not quite. ``Discouragement'' may be what we feel
when we consider how much money it will cost to retire too soon; the ``disincentive''
is that arrangement in the system that causes the loss of money and the
concomitant discouragement.



The making of new names is an inanity only when it isn't necessary. Here
again we can see that most of us need to ape those who are higher on the
scale of technology. Most of our unnecessary jargon consists of words like
``interface'' and ``input,'' precise namings at one level
of technology, which seep downward into lower levels where they are neither
precise nor even needed. There's more to the process, though, than the simple
mimicking of somebody else's names; we also mimic the process by which the
names come to be made in the first place. That's how we get the inane neologisms
like ``orientate'' and ``updation.'' (That may need clarification
for the more sheltered reader: an ``updation'' is what you get when
you are updated. As yet we have no word for what you get when you are dated
up. Be patient.) Thus the school people have changed ``competence''
to ``competency,'' gaining thereby some small increase in self-esteem
and a twenty-five percent increase in syllables, but without naming anything
that wasn't already named by ``competence.''



Remember now the prayers of the grant-seekers. If you've forgotten them,
here is a mournful reminder: ``Within the general system of teaching
acts are many subsets of actions and processes.'' Notice how cunningly
this manages to{\bfseries  tell}  almost nothing while{\bfseries }  naming many things. All that it {\bfseries tells}  us is that ``teaching''
has parts, parts that may as well have been called components, elements,
and factors. But it {\bfseries names}  a system, even a {\bfseries general}  system
as though there were some means to distinguish it from a {\bfseries specific}  system; it names certain acts, here carefully but needlessly distinguished
as {\bfseries teaching}  acts; it {\bfseries names}  subsets and actions
and processes. It sounds impressive, but it tells nothing.



That was the passage in which we found unspecified but supposedly important
``developments in philosophy, psychology, and communications theory.''
It offered us also ``translation, transformation, and organization of
subject matter into meanings,'' a resounding string of names that ought
to make certain fine distinctions but don't. In this kind of writing, which
must also be called this kind of thinking, the specious elaboration of names
becomes so automatic that we find even the unlikely naming of the ``instruction
of individuals and groups'' where the single word ``instruction''
would have been enough.



It has often been noted that bad English, especially among educators
and bureaucrats, is clogged with ponderous parades of nouns: ``Government
personnel applicants for illiteracy enhancement remediation programs must
submit program application permission forms in accordance with bureau application
procedure policies,'' or something like that. Such writing is indeed
clogged with nouns, but why? It's simple. Once again, the Master Worm eats
away the central switchboard that connects naming to telling. When these
people go to say something, they can only babble a string of names.



Now we can understand better the plight of P, whom you will remember
as the man who is going to test high school children for minimum competence
(or as he would put it, competency) in literacy. He is the man who said:


\begin{quote}

  
Our program is designed to enhance the concept of an open-ended learning
  program with emphasis on a continuum of multi-ethnic, academically enriched
  learning using the identified intellectually gifted child as the agent
  or director of his own learning.

\end{quote}



Omitting for now his specious modifiers, modifiers that make no useful
distinctions, we see that a program is designed to enhance the concept of
a program with emphasis on a continuum using a child as an agent or as a
director. (It sounds as though those last two might be interchangeable.)
This is a failure in the switchboard; telling is overwhelmed by naming.
The namings, furthermore, are all abstract, pointing into an evoked world
of insubstantial programs and concepts and continua. What, exactly, do we{\bfseries 
do}  when we enhance the concept of a program? Will emphasis on a continuum
do the job? As to the specious modifiers, there too we find naming without
telling in a collection of faddish words. Is an open-ended learning program
a learning program that is open-ended or is it a program of open-ended learning?
Does either of those things make much sense? What other intellectually gifted
child than the ``identified'' gifted child could there possibly
be to put into an open-ended learning program or even into a program of
open-ended learning? How else but academically might learning be enriched?



If this were a case of telling rather than mere naming, we would have
none of those questions. Nevertheless, be mindful of P's problem. He does
have to write something once in a while --- it's probably in his job description
--- and there obviously isn't much to tell. He has to say something, and
a bewildering exercise in naming may convince the thoughtless and indolent
that something must have been told. This is not to say, however, that P
is practicing to deceive. The truth is almost surely worse than that. He
very probably thinks that he {\bfseries has}  told something and, accordingly,
that he has thought something.



Here is a most appropriate example of naming disguised as telling. These
are the unconsciously ironic words{\bfseries }  of some people who imagine that
they are going to do something about the writing skills of schoolchildren:


\begin{quote}

  
It is necessary that schools and school districts emphasize the importance
  of imparting to students the skills and attitudes which are the underpinnings
  of a comfortable, confident, successful producer of all forms of written
  matter, including prose, poetry, and practical narrative and descriptive
  and interrogatory writing (e.g., letters, applications, requests for information,
  reports, etc.) .

\end{quote}



This, after many months of deliberation, was one of the most important
conclusions of an advisory committee of experts on reading and writing.
They have, in effect, decided that the schools should teach the students
how to write. The elevator man, of course, could have told you that. If
you don't have an elevator, you could have gotten the same information from
the taxi driver or the man who reads the meter. This is by no means to denigrate
the achievement of the committee; what has always been perfectly obvious
to all the rest of us actually{\bfseries  is}  a tremendous breakthrough for educators,
and they are much to be congratulated for having so largely transcended
their training. However, they have still a little more transcending to do.
The passage shows all of the symptoms of profound and probably irreversible
brain damage. It could be taken for a miniature model of everything that
is seriously wrong with the use of English in our time. Reading prose like
that is like watching some game in which you can't see the ball.



Give yourself a little test. Don't reread the passage. It is, although
it probably didn't seem so when you read it, all one sentence. Try hard
to remember the subject of the sentence. The subject of a sentence is not
just a grammatical reality; it is a reality of thought. It's what the sentence
is about, or, in more appropriate terms right now, it is the ``naming''
at the heart of the ``telling.'' If you have been able to remember
the subject, you should have no trouble remembering the verb, and when you
do you will have recalled the very core of this sentence, the hard, inner
skeleton of meaning so characteristic of sentences in English and many other
languages. In this case, however, the skeleton is a little squishy: It is
``It is.''



Where this writer says ``It is necessary that the schools'' and
so forth, you or I or the elevator man would probably say: ``The schools
should do something.'' Even so, we would only be trying to make the
best of the bad mess. Is this sentence supposed to be about {\bfseries schools} ? Or is it supposed to be about {\bfseries writing} ? ``It''
is only the grammatical subject of the sentence; what the sentence is {\bfseries about}  is unclear. The schools and school districts, along with a whole
catalogue of other things, have been submerged into a ``that'' clause.
This is another way of evading responsibility and pointing not to what is
in the mind of the writer but to what we're supposed to understand, apparently,
as a condition in the universe. The writer is putting as much distance as
possible between himself and what he says. Such prose is a form of immorality,
similar to the Divine Passive and the dangling modifiers of the chair of
the EEOC. People who write like that are in flight from the responsibility
implied by the basic structure of the English in which doers do deeds.



Prose that clouds responsibility also diminishes humanity. When Churchill
said, ``We shall fight on the beaches,'' his grammar said for him,
and to all of us who share that grammar: ``I, a man, speak these words
out of the thoughts of my mind, and I mean them.'' Suppose that he had
said instead: ``It may become necessary that we fight on the beaches.''
{\bfseries Then}  his grammar would have said for him and to us: ``There
may be in the universe some condition of which we ought to be mindful. You
will understand, of course, that this is what should be said, but as to
whether or not the whole thing is my idea or not is neither here nor there.''
Englishmen might well have packed up by the millions and moved to Nova Scotia.
The writer of our passage would probably have said: ``It may become
necessary that we emphasize the importance of imparting to ourselves the
skills and attitudes which are the necessary underpinnings of successful
engagers in all forms of combat on the beaches.'' Englishmen are plucky,
but not that plucky. After such words they would simply have surrendered.



Naming without telling is equally an evasion of responsibility. We can
talk about components, elements, factors, sets, subsets, translations, and
transformations only because we do not expect to be called to account for
our words. The more of these words we use, the better we can bewilder the
reader or even bamboozle him into the conviction that we must know what
we are talking about, thus putting off, perhaps forever, the day of reckoning.
Notice how that happens in the passage just cited. What should the schools-{\bfseries and}  the school districts- actually do? They should emphasize. That's
what it says --- that's the verb that goes with the schools and the school
districts. And what should they emphasize? They should emphasize importance.
Importance? What importance should they emphasize? They should emphasize
the importance of imparting! Can we ask ``imparting what?''? No,
not yet. First we must ask ``imparting to whom?'' So we ask it.
We are answered that they should emphasize the importance of imparting to
{\bfseries students{\itshape .} } Ah! All of a sudden some human beings appear. Unfortunately,
however, they will turn out to be superfluous, because there just isn't
anyone around in the schools and school districts {\bfseries except}  students
to whom to do that imparting whose importance is to be emphasized. So we
go on. Now we can ask ``imparting what?'' Imparting skills and attitudes,
of course. What skills and attitudes? Skills and attitudes which are underpinnings,
naturally. Underpinnings of a producer. What else did you expect? What kind
of a producer? A comfortable, confident, successful producer. And so on.
The thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth words of this sentence are ``written
matter.''



Someone here has taken great pains {\bfseries not}  to say something. Even
``writing'' is avoided. We hear, instead, about ``written matter,''
which presumably includes clay tablets and the ``Hot'' and ``Cold''
labels on faucets. ``Written matter'' is needlessly, but meagerly,
elaborated into ``prose, poetry, and practical narrative and descriptive
and interrogatory writing,'' to say nothing of the e.g. This is one
of those catalogues of names meant to convince the reader that somebody
has thought all this out. Unfortunately, the silly invention of ``interrogatory
writing'' gives the game away and reveals that these are all names,
not thoughts, and that nothing is told.



When the connections between naming and telling are broken, our language
becomes subhuman. The crows and the antelope exist by a system of reflexive
naming, a sort of sublanguage perfectly suited to serve the needs of herds
and flocks. That sublanguage, not surprisingly therefore, flourishes most
where we have formed our own herds and flocks, in bureaucracies and corporate
structures. Some individual human being wrote that stuff about emphasizing
the importance of imparting. Lost somewhere in that producer's underpinnings,
there is a human mind with the power of rational thought. What has become
of it? Where is Nigger Jim, now that we need him? He would ask: Is a bureaucrat
a man? Is an educationist a man? How come he don't speak like a man?



\chapter{Sentimental Education}



We Americans are wondrously religious, or at least apocalyptic. We believe
that the meaning of things is to be seen not in the way things are but in
the way they will be someday. When the urgings of evidence suggest that
we are in trouble, we are untroubled, because we are still, and always,
on our way. We hate stupidity and ignorance, of course, but we know that
they're only temporary. Although stupidity and ignorance are not rare and
although they don't seem to be diminishing, we do not characterize America
as a nation of stupid and ignorant people. It's the same with things like
crime and poverty and racial hatred. Well, yes, we {\bfseries have}  those
things, and, yes, they do seem to be growing, but that doesn't mean that
America is a nation of criminals and paupers and bigots. There {\bfseries are}  such people, but they are aberrations. In time we'll change all
that. Education --- that's the answer to it all.



Education will wipe out stupidity and ignorance. Informed and intelligent
people will know better than to stick up gas stations for a lousy thirty
bucks. They will have the skills to make good honest livings, mostly as
chairmen of the boards of General Motors or IBM. As we learn more about
each other, black, white, brown, whatever, we'll find new respect for each
other and new values in the mingling of our variously rich cultures, and
the black and the brown faces will be seen not only in the halls of Congress
and the faculties of our venerable universities and colleges but even on
hockey teams. Now that's the real America, look, right over there, you have
to squint a little, see, there just above that fruited plain?



The history of mankind hasn't yet provided any examples of a decrease
in stupidity and ignorance and their presumably attendant evils, but we
have hope. After all, history hasn't provided anything like us, either,
until pretty recently. The American experiment is unique, especially the
American experiment in education. It is that which accounts for our amazing
progress and the effectiveness of our technology. We educate (well, we're
{\bfseries going}  to educate, just you wait and see) {\bfseries all}  the people,
not just the upper classes, not just the specialists, not {\bfseries any}  fraction
of any kind, but everybody. History doesn't scare us. We are the Americans.



But even for the Americans the swift eradication of stupidity and ignorance
is a large undertaking. Let's not think about all of that just now. Let's
imagine something smaller and try to foresee its consequences. Let's simply
ask what it would take to provide all the third graders in America with
teachers who are correct and precise in their spelling and punctuation.
After all, that's not an unreasonable expectation. Spelling and punctuation
can be learned, and teachers, of all people, can be expected to have learned
them. So what must we do?



First, let's be reasonable. Anyone who writes English makes an occasional
little mistake in spelling. We won't insist on absolute accuracy at all
times, but somewhere between absolute accuracy at all times and four appearances
of ``artical'' in a short public letter we must draw a line. It
seems reasonable to draw that line somewhat closer to accuracy than to ``artical.''
Are our teachers the hope of the nation? Well, of course. Are they the leaders
of our youth into the paths of knowledge and the exercise of the mind? You
know it. At those little academic skills like spelling and punctuation should
they be as good as the average American? NO, better. Better than three quarters
of us all? At the least. Better than nine out of ten? That seems reasonable.
Pick any number you like.



The simplest and most drastic way to achieve that result would be to
give all third-grade teachers a test and send away into the Peace Corps
in Afghanistan any who can't spell and punctuate. Could we do this? Certainly
not. Someone will show that the test is culturally biased against those
in whose background there can be shown a distinct distaste for spelling,
which is, after all, nothing more than a genteel skill prized mostly among
idle ladies of the privileged classes, like painting on velvet. The testing
of teachers is not encouraged by teachers' organizations. It is their view,
anyway, that a teacher's competence is demonstrated by the granting of a
certificate.



That moves us back a square. Perhaps we can arrange that those who grant
those certificates will withhold them from incipient third-grade teachers
until they have passed the spelling and punctuation test. If you happen
to be an idle lady of the privileged classes and tired of painting on velvet,
you can find a new and exciting hobby by writing to certifying agencies
and state boards of education and legislators and urging some such thing.
Eventually, you'll be able to fill whole scrapbooks with entertaining replies
and perhaps even strike a deal with some publisher of humorous paperbacks.
You'll be told that the certifiers certify whomsoever the teacher-training
academies put forth as certifiable. You may even be told that, whatever
evidence you may have to the contrary, third-grade teachers certainly do
know how to spell and punctuate, since those teacher-training academies
have the highest standards and would never put forth as a candidate for
certification anyone lacking such basic skills. The love between the certifiers
and the teacher-training academies is warm and undying. The certifiers in
no way construe their task as ``checking up'' on the productions
of the teacher trainers.



So we move back one more square and call on the dean of the local teacher-training
academy. He greets us warmly and offers us seats and instant coffee with
Popsicle-stick stirrers. He (well, perhaps he's a he/she) is always glad
to contribute to an increased awareness on the part of the public of issues
and concerns centered around the question of current practices in the field
of education. He will assure us of the commitment ``on the part of I
and my colleagues'' to excellence and professionalism, including the
mastery of skills/methods relevant to desirable outcomes. He will assure
us that trained observers have, in the case of each candidate for certification,
observed and made judgments upon several dimensions of behaviors and that
interaction analysis, as studies have shown, confirms that student teachers
can be seen to have demonstrated practical/theoretical sensitization to
certain desirable teaching actions and procedures, and that he is perfectly
satisfied that instruments already administered tend to corroborate these
findings. We feel that we would like to administer unto {\bfseries him}  some
instrument, but we restrain ourselves and persist in asking about spelling
and punctuation. He reminds us of the affective and noncognitive parameters
and points out that basic language arts competencies are in the charge of
another department. But surely, we ask, the teacher-teachers will notice
from time to time that some would-be teacher can't spell or punctuate. Now
we learn that teacher-teachers are interested in things like their students'
positive self-images and their ability to identify with members of other
cultures and their effectiveness in maintaining an even temperature in the
classroom at all times. Furthermore, we learn that much of the teaching
of teachers is accomplished by breaking up into small groups and discussing
issues/concerns relative to preassessment without much attention to mechanical
details like spelling and punctuation.



There's no help for it. We go back another square to the people who
{\bfseries are}  in charge of spelling and punctuation, only to learn that
they don't see it that way. Not many of those who teach the freshman composition
course are still mired in the outworn age of print, or, as they put it,
the print media. Most of their students are into communications media or
even multimedia communications. There are some courses in {\bfseries creative} 
writing but creative writing does not concern itself much with spelling
and punctuation. Furthermore, even should some would-be third-grade teacher
find herself in a writing course, and even should she prove unable to spell
or punctuate, the final judgment of her language arts competency would be
made not on the basis of merely mechanical considerations but rather as
a result of the earnestness of her endeavor and the originality of her ideas.
Besides, this is a college, and if students come to us from high schools
where they are not taught spelling and punctuation, there's nothing we can
do about it. If we limited our enrollments to those who {\bfseries can}  spell
and punctuate, we wouldn't be able to pay for the electricity to run our
multimedia machines and we'd be hauled into court for discriminating against
whole legions of minorities, including would-be third-grade teachers whose
consciousnesses have been raised to that point where they just know that
we are trying to exclude them from a respectable and not-too-demanding profession
on nothing more than the flimsy pretext that they are unable to punctuate
or spell, overlooking entirely the fact that they just love children.



So we go backward square by square. The principal of the high school
refers us to the principal of the junior high school who refers us to the
principal of the elementary school. Here, at the bitter end, we hear the
worst news of all. Here we are told: Yes, it's true. We do have some trouble
teaching spelling and punctuation. But what can we do? Why, the third-grade
teachers themselves have some trouble with those things. And there we are,
staring into an infinite regression. We cannot raise up unto ourselves a
generation of third-grade teachers who can spell and punctuate until we
first provide ourselves with a generation of third-grade teachers who can
spell and punctuate. The problem isn't here and it isn't there; it's everywhere.
If we want to do only so simple a thing as ensure that all third-grade teachers
will be expert in spelling and punctuation, we will have to change everything
that happens at every step of the process by which we now provide ourselves
with third-grade teachers. Lacking such unimaginably large changes, we must
simply reconcile ourselves to third-grade teachers whose spelling and punctuation
are just a little bit shabby.



If we could make those changes, however, we would find that we had also
dealt with the executive secretary, and the provost, and the entire bureaucracy
of the Department of Transportation, and even the president of the University
of Arizona. They all come from the same litter. They are all examples of
an education that does not foster precision and correctness. It's not that
that education is {\bfseries unable}  to foster precision and correctness,
for in some cases and in some degree it {\bfseries does}  do that. It can
be done, most easily, through study and practice in the arts of language
and number. We know how to do it. We have chosen not to do it and, having
so chosen, have by now brought ourselves to that extremity from which we
cannot turn back without turning everything over.



We are in some danger. It is with us as it is with a man who has chosen
to play at once upon the ukulele and the harmonica while standing on one
foot on the tip of a Coke bottle and twirling on the other foot two Hula-Hoops
and spinning a platter on the end of a long stick balanced on his nose.
His act may be ill-advised, but this is not the time to discuss it with
him. What we do is incalculably more complicated and difficult than any
juggling act, and, lacking hope of swift and total destruction, there's
obviously no end to it. We can never stop and take a bow. Well, we could
stop, but we wouldn't be in any condition to bow, and it is doubtful that
anyone would applaud.



Collectively, we own and operate an enterprise complicated far beyond
the power of any single mind to grasp in its entirety. We manufacture, by
millions and billions, complicated and cunning devices beyond the dreams
even of our grandparents. We operate massive, interlocking systems and actually
keep track of billions, perhaps trillions, of bits of information. The successes
of our systems are staggering. The banks do keep track of our accounts.
We punch some buttons and find ourselves talking to a librarian in Athens
if we please. Great contraptions of metal, bigger than some garden-style
apartment houses, do get into the air and fly to Copenhagen, and the innumerable
pages of the Sunday {\itshape New York Times} are covered with print every week
as long as there isn't a strike. That's not all. When it says that a story
is continued on page 43, it usually is.



Nevertheless, there are signs of trouble. Somebody keeps losing enriched
plutonium and even gold bullion. The latter will probably make its way harmlessly
to a numbered account in Switzerland, but the former may well make its way
to the IRA or the PLO. In some cars somebody has been putting the wrong
engine, and other cars are cunningly designed to explode on impact. If your
car doesn't explode, maybe your tires will. Deadly substances seep from
the earth under the swing sets in the backyards of innocent home owners.
A keypunch operator punches the wrong key and sends you 436 subscriptions
to {\itshape Poultry Gazette},  and another keypunch operator deposits an extra
\$30,000 in your checking account, which seems grand until the IRS starts
asking you to account for it. You discover that it is no longer humanly
possible to change an erroneous bill from the gas company. A Christmas card
from your great-aunt arrives three and a half years late, and the freight
car bringing your new trash compactor has disappeared somewhere on a siding
in Nebraska. It looks as though things are beginning to fall apart.



Those are only the things that we know about. We do not know what critical
matter has gone awry in the State Department or what mistaken conclusions
based on false logic and insufficient information have been formed in the
Pentagon. We do not know that our surgeon has been shown the wrong lab reports,
lab reports in any case misleading because the lab technician has added
instead of subtracted, and we do not know that the nurse has given us somebody
else's name tag. All of our systems seem to be outgrowing our abilities
to deal with them.



It may be that we have not done well to build such colossal complexities
into our culture. It may be that the Jiukiukwe do live ``better''
than we in some way, in simple peace, but they also live miserably, and
it's far too late to opt for the simple life. If we drop the Hula-Hoops,
the platter will crash down on our heads and we'll break the ukulele and
choke on the harmonica, to say nothing of what will happen when we land
on the Coke bottle. We must keep the damned thing going, and that requires
intelligent thought and the habit of precision.



I once visited a large military base where recruits were trained by the
thousands. Most of it was unenlightening, except for the parachute-packing
school, which was amazing. Young men, {\bfseries very}  young men, were busy learning
to fold and tuck and arrange acres of cloth and miles of cord. A taciturn
and unentertainable master sergeant was showing me around. He hadn't smiled
when I asked him to show me the ropes, and he didn't smile when I asked
him how on earth they tested the work of the parachute packers to find out
whether or not they had passed the course. Simple, he said. The student
would pack a few parachutes and the instructor would choose one at random,
the one that the student would use when he jumped out of an airplane right
after lunch. It was easy to tell who had passed and who had failed.



Parachute-packing isn't all that hard. Although it does require the habit
of precision, as well as some small manual dexterity, it calls for little
intelligent thought, and fairly stupid recruits learn it without much difficulty.
However stupid they may be, they are surely what an educationist would call
``highly motivated.'' Now if a couple of callow noncoms can teach
a pimply dropout to pack a parachute as though his life depended on it,
why is it that sixteen years of schooling cannot teach a third-grade teacher
to spell?



Spelling isn't all that hard, either. If the United States Army or AT\&T,
for that matter, were to decide that its people had to spell correctly,
then they would find ways to teach spelling, and the people would learn.
Industries, especially, are doing something very much like that already.
They find more and more that whatever skills they had hoped to find in college
graduates must, in fact, be taught after graduation. Where great expertise
is required in certain technical callings, industries often have not only
to teach all their people but also to obliterate the ineptitudes and misinformation
they got in college. Fewer and fewer courses of study actually prepare people
for careers. When they are at their best, they prepare people to prepare
for careers.



It could be worse. Many of our college graduates {\itshape are} at least
prepared to prepare for a career and thus able to learn on the job how to
do the job correctly and effectively. Would-be journalists and accountants
and engineers learn that there {\itshape is} a life after college, because after
four years of more or less social promotion they find themselves on a sterner
testing ground. Now they {\bfseries must}  learn accuracy and correctness or look
for another way of life, perhaps as salesmen of shoes. Exxon will not for
long keep paying the would-be geologist solely because he loves oil and
tries very hard. The incipient teacher, however, {\bfseries will}  be retained
--- permanently --- if he ``really cares'' about children and
tries very hard. When the brand-new physician is handed his license to practice,
the testing of his competence begins. When the brand-new teacher is given
his certificate, the testing of his intellectual competence is over. From
now on he will be tested only in other matters: his ability to get along
with assistant principals and guidance counselors, his dress and deportment,
and the tranquillity of his classroom. Unless he is visibly and outrageously
ignorant and illiterate, no one will ever again assess the work of his mind.
Or, more precisely, no one {\bfseries within}  that system will assess
the work of his mind. That's not considered professional and would set a
very dangerous example.



From the center of our civilization --- our system of education, the
largest single enterprise we have --- the fog of thoughtlessness and imprecision
spreads in all directions. People who cannot get their thoughts straight
through the control of language live baffled and frustrated lives. They
must accept stock answers to their most vexing questions; they are easily
persuaded by flawed logic; they cannot solve their problems because they
cannot express them accurately. Worst of all, they cannot even discern their
plight, for to do so requires a kind of ``discerning'' of a world
not present to immediate experience, a world that ``exists'' only
in the discourse that they have not mastered.



Pity that chair, a lady beset by what must be a demanding and unhappy
task. The EEOC, after all, is mostly a massive complaint department, and
the complaints brought to it, trivial as some might seem, are of tremendous
importance to certain human beings and worthy of respect and intelligent
attention. What a job it must be. It requires not only a well-formulated
understanding of humanity but a thorough knowledge of many laws, rules,
regulations, and the continuous application of logical thought informed
by fact. When we looked at the language of the chair, we were driven to
conclude that one of two things must be true. Her distortions of English
could be seen either as ``mistakes,'' in which case her education
seemed inadequate to her task, or as unconscious revelations of an unspoken
feeling about her work and the people for whom she works. It must be, in
fact, that both of these things are true.



To do that work, even for a master of the technology of thought, would
be difficult and discouraging. How easy it must be, but still how unpardonable,
to blame the pains and frustrations of the work on those exasperating citizens
who {\bfseries will}  be complaining and mistreating each other in all
seasons. When we combine the chair's obviously indifferent education with
the inescapable anguish of her work, we cannot be surprised that her language
betrays her and evokes a world that is not, a world that suits her far better
than the world we count on her to understand and manipulate. She is come
into deep waters where she cannot stand. Yet that work must be done.



While we require in tens of millions the habit of precision, in other
millions we require as well the further and even more important ability
that flows from the careful use of language --- the power of thought in
discourse. How many chairs of how many commissions are there who lack that
power because of sloppy language? How many precise thinkers do we need?
Where will we get them? Is there some number below which we cannot fall
if chaos is to be postponed yet another year? Are we approaching that number?
What can we say of our campaign to wipe out stupidity and ignorance when
we see that so many who are paid for the work of their minds wander in darkness
and fog?



To dispel ignorance, of course, is only the second aim of education;
the first aim is to overcome stupidity. Stupidity is the natural condition
of mankind, and if we just left ourselves alone most of us would be stupid.
It's like teeth. Without dentistry, most of us would have crumbling and
crooked teeth, and those few naturally endowed with tough enamel and a good
bite would become an envied elite, happily savaging steaks and chops while
the rest of us sit around gumming stews and porridge.



The ordinary stupidity of mankind can be cured or at least severely mitigated.
It isn't even especially difficult to do. Intelligence is, after all, not
so much an innate propensity as an invention, a device designed and elaborated
mostly for technological purposes. Intelligence can be understood as a learned
system for distinguishing between things that seem similar and discovering
the similarities in things that seem different. Stupidity is the lack of
such a system. We can teach intelligence to the stupid just as easily as
we can straighten crooked teeth, but we do have to {\bfseries do}  it. It doesn't
just happen. To make the stupid intelligent requires little more than skill
and practice in language.



There are other symbol systems in which to practice intelligence. Mathematics
and physics and perhaps even music seem to be systems for the uttering of
propositions and the exploration of likeness and difference, but they are
obviously less accessible to most of us than the language we all learn to
speak. It may be that the propensities for learning those symbol systems
simply aren't to be found in most of us any more than tough enamel, but
the propensities for language are universal, and only in special and pathological
conditions do human beings fail to learn a language.



However, while language is the most readily available device for the
work of intelligence, just to know a language is not enough any more than
being able to wiggle your fingers is enough to make you a pianist. For most
of us, the rudimentary skills of language we all have even before we go
to school are to intelligent discourse what ``Chopsticks'' is to
music. The aim of education is to make those rudimentary skills into the
medium of thought.



The possession of language, like the fact of birth, makes us human beings.
Neither the language nor the birth is by itself enough to make us civilized
human beings. Civilization develops in us, one by one, in a process that
often seems analogous to the growth of civilization in mankind at large.
We begin as brutes, cute brutes maybe, but brutes. We become barbarians.
Eventually, sometimes, we become civilized members of a complicated technological
culture. Civilization, whether individual or collective, grows as ideas
are constructed in coherent discourse. As things stand with us just now,
we are ready to count it a success should we be able to convert some number
of brutes into barbarians.







This kind of book traditionally concludes with an earnest little sermon
made up of helpful hints. I have none to offer. I can offer only the reasons
that seem to preclude helpful hints.



1. There is literacy and there is literacy. The ability to do some reading
and to do some writing is a kind of literacy, to be sure, but it is the
kind of literacy that might have been attained three thousand years ago
before the invention of discursive prose and the birth of formal reasoning.
Meager as that literacy may be, it is the kind of literacy that we haven't
been able to achieve, since it is the very goal of such social disorders
as the Plain English Fad and the Minimum Competence Mania. The elaborate
and technological civilization that we must operate calls for much more
than that. It requires millions of people able to construct and follow discursive
thought. It demands widespread competence in little things as well as great,
habits of precision, to be learned only through a mastery of the symbol
system of language. For many reasons, it has become more and more difficult
to teach that greater literacy, and we have chosen to settle for the lesser.
We're not doing too well at that. Every year, as our civilization grows
more complex, that lesser literacy becomes less and less adequate, and greater
and greater multitudes of people are left behind in a fog of ineffectiveness.
As those multitudes grow, it becomes more and more difficult to teach even
that lesser literacy, which must, accordingly, grow always less. And the
time must come, therefore, when very few of us will have the skills with
which to construct and follow discursive thought. We will rule the land,
but it will not be a restful occupation or a long-lasting one.



2. All of that might be avoided only through a massive change in our
system of public education, perhaps only through its annihilation and total
reconstruction. Education as now constituted will never do more than the
least it can do. The reason for that is easy to see. Of all of the elaborate
corporate institutions in our civilization, education is the only one in
which there is no important incentive to success. Educators do not even
have to bother their heads about getting reelected. The prosperity of the
schools does not depend on successful schooling. Indeed, in the current
hysteria over the obvious failures of the schools, we have chosen to send
good money after bad and enrich our schools in direct proportion to their
failures. This further makes it seem likely that should the schools actually
succeed, all they could expect would be the withdrawal of the enrichment
that comes with failure. That must be what is meant by a ``disincentive.''



For the individuals in public education, there {\bfseries are}  incentives
to success, but they have almost nothing to do with the teaching of students.
The successful members of the system are those who can escape the tedious
demands of the classroom. From that escape, talented and effective teachers
are generally debarred, partly because they are little likely to seek it
and partly because of a reasonable institutional bias against removing a
good teacher from the classroom. As a result, and in spite of the sentimental
folklore of the trade, there are in fact no significant rewards available
to the good teacher. Nor are there any significant punishments for the bad
teacher. Indeed, it is the bad teacher who is the more inclined and encouraged
to escape the classroom and thus achieve what is recognized as a success
in public education, an administrative position. The making of policy, therefore,
is ultimately given over to the least competent individuals in the system.



3. Public education is dreary. It is dreary because it is boring. It
is boring because it requires of its captives only a small portion of their
attention, leaving the better part of their energies unfocused. That is
why the first concern of parents, teachers, and administrators is for what
they call ``discipline.'' The schools have become dangerous places,
but that is partly their own doing. They respond to the problem of ``discipline''
by calling for the restraint and punishment of the unruly; restraint and
punishment however, will provide not discipline but, at the best, a temporary
and sullen obedience. Ruly behavior expresses a ruly mind, and the discipline
of word and thought provides the discipline of deed. From those incarcerated
in enforced idleness, discipline cannot be expected. A rigorous course of
study in mathematics or Latin will engender more discipline than a thousand
guards, but the system is able to provide only the latter.



4. The supposed American commitment to universe public education is,
in fact, nothing more than a congregational recitation of unexamined slogans.
We do not know what we {\bfseries mean}  by an education, because we have
not examined the language in which we describe it. We have not examined
that language because we are not in the habit of examining language. We
are not in that habit because we have been corporately educated in a system
in which the critical examination of language and the skills required for
that examination are less and less taught. They are less and less taught
because they are less and less to be found among those who teach and those
who direct the course of education. They are less and less to be found because
people who do have the skills of critical thought and clear language are
not likely to waste them by going to work in an institution founded on the
recitation of unexamined slogans.



It takes some kind of a fool to spend his life in the maximization of
potential through the application of sets and subsets of actions aimed at
the translation, transformation, and organization of matter into meaning
for individuals and groups. Only the thoughtless can pompously tell themselves
about things like behavior modification and catalytical non-disciplines
and preassessment instruments. No one skilled in language and thought could
keep his sanity in that world of empty jargon, where he would find himself
set to the task of pretending to clarify fictitious values and enhancing
the self-esteem of the utterly unskilled by preaching that a positive self-image
is more important than a clear sentence. In short, the land of public education
provides a happy home only for those in whom the skills of language and
thought are but poorly developed. When linguistically skilled persons do
wander into that world, they must soon either leave it or withdraw into
the privacy of their own classrooms and learn to ignore everything else.
They are strangers in a strange land where the natives speak no rational
tongue at all.



The absence of a rational language is necessary to the peace of that
system. Its {\itshape lingua franca} of unreason provides pretended answers
to the questions we might ask about incentive. Just {\bfseries why}  do you want
to succeed in teaching the young? we ask. They answer: Because we are professionals
committed to excellence and quality education. What is ``quality education''?
Here are the answers of a widely read educationist. It is an education in
which


\begin{quote}

  
\ldots students are taught to appreciate\ldots cultures other than their
  own and to perceive themselves in a positive light. In addition, they are
  encouraged to express their feelings openly and honestly, to develop and
  maintain good interpersonal relationships and to question basic ideas.

\end{quote}



These empty slogans were put forth in defense of the schools against
the charge of failing to teach elementary skills of reading and writing.
In what language then will those students ``question basic ideas''?
How will they know them when they see them? Will they ever question the
basic ideas implicit in ``appreciating'' cultures and perceiving
themselves in ``positive lights''? These are not, it is important
to note, the words of an eccentric educationist swimming against the tide.
They express the orthodox creed. The robe of education in our time is a
scanty garment; most of it is lunatic fringe.







A line runs from the meditations of the heart to the words of the mouth.
The meditations are not clear to us until the mouth utters its words. If
what the mouth utters is unclear or foolish or mendacious, it must be that
the meditations are the same. But the line runs both ways. The words of
the mouth will {\bfseries become}  the meditations of the heart, and the habit
of loose talk loosens the fastenings of our understanding.



Sometimes we all know that. When a functionary of our government tells
us that his previous statements have suddenly become ``inoperative,''
we see that what has been committed is not a euphemism but an immorality.
While pretending to admit to the truth, the word evokes a world that never
was, a world in which sentences that were once ``true'' now become,
through some random twitch of history, not exactly ``false'' but
at least ineffective, like an engine that used to start but doesn't anymore
now that the weather has turned cold. We may snicker and even sneer at the
man who tells us that his words have now become ``inoperative,''
but he still has a victory. He has put that tiny worm into our ears. It
will eat its way into our brains and dull some power of language, so that
when his successors later talk to us about ``enhanced radiation devices''
we may sneer and snicker less. When enough of those worms have made their
homes in our skulls --- how long do you suppose that will take? ---
the day will come when we merely nod.



And from nodding we will go to dozing, and from dozing, to sleep.


\backmatter

\chapter{Critical Bibliography}



It's hard to know what to call the citations that I have used in this
book. Except for a few minor entries ---~the imagined beginnings
of some memos and letters and the facetious but not unlikely grant proposal
--- they were all written by human beings in the course of their labors.
I would like to characterize them, therefore, as ``real,'' but somehow
the word seems to suggest either too much or not enough. They {\bfseries are}  real, real writings of real people, to be sure, and real pieces
of paper bearing real bunches of marks, and yet to call them ``real''
and to leave it at that seems at least a mild abuse of language. Authentic?
Genuine? I just don't know. Let it be. Real they are, and yet unreal.



The chair of the EEOC is, of course, the real chair of the real EEOC,
and her words are taken from an article purporting to describe a ``reform''
of some kind in that agency. Her writing should make us wonder just what
sort of reform we can expect. Could clients and charging parties be eliminated
as effectively in fact as they are in grammar, the work of the EEOC would
surely diminish. That would be, I suppose, a kind of reform.



The third-grade teacher, of course, is a real third-grade teacher, and
the teacher candidates who are quoted at length in Chapter 8 are every bit
as real as she. Furthermore, those candidates must have been doing their
very best. Those little scraps of writing were done in the hope of gainful
employment. In the text, I have called them ``essays,'' but they
aren't any such thing. They are disorganized and ill-remembered recitations;
an essay is a weighing and testing of thought and idea in discourse. ``Essaying''
is a trying-out; these little scraps are trottings-out.



The provost at least used to be real. He may still be real, but he is
no longer a real provost. He was the chief academic officer of a large branch
of a large state university. His departure from provosthood seems not to
have been because of his language. Inane language has never blighted an
academic career.



The forester was, of course, applying for a grant. He wanted --- and
who can blame him --- to wander around in the woods at our expense, stopping
awhile here and there and saying, ``Gee, wouldn't this be a great place
for some picnic tables.'' So what could the poor fellow do? If he had
put it that way, no one would have shelled out tax money, so he had to talk
about sub-variables and the existing physical status. For{\bfseries  that}  we
give money. I know another woodland wanderer who says, in his Ph.D. dissertation:
``The purpose of this section is to examine part of the valley infrastructure
of seemingly vital importance to the success of the Project as a recreation
facility: accessibility by recreationists.'' I will considerately say
no more of him, except to assure you that he got his degree and a choice
appointment. I like to imagine these two outdoor types meeting by the shores
of a mountain lake and exchanging views. The one would speak lyrically of
groupings, both physical and socio-economic, and the other would urge ``ground-truthing''
one of his favorite activities.



The definition of teaching as a ``systematic series of actions directed
toward specific ends'' has an interesting provenance. Who wrote it I
don't know. It was put forth with the boast that thirteen people had labored
for eighty hours to produce it. That's one thousand forty hours, and the
laborers were all highly paid educationists, so the document must have cost
much more than seven maids with seven mops for half a year. Neither group
could get it clear. Sad to say, the passage is from a proposal to establish
a program for the training of excellent teachers.



The dervish of Chapter 11 is also real, although he makes that word sound
even less appropriate. The stuff that he writes he also teaches, at public
expense, in a state college in the Northwest. Some people have found his
work so ludicrous that they thought it must have been made up by me. Impossible.
Some kinds of bad language can be faked, since they are rigidly formulaic,
but only a true believer can dream up on-site/off-site, bipolar, entities
and dyads. If you find yourself laughing at this writer, try to remember
that every two weeks when he picks up his paycheck the laugh is on you.
If it would make you feel better to imagine that he is the only one of his
kind in American education, go ahead and try.



The words of P were chosen because they ought to be familiar by now.
Unlike the other examples, they have been widely quoted in the public press.
P is, maybe was, a high school principal in Texas. P's companion in misery,
the young man who wants to be an insurance adjuster, is, maybe was, also
real, a recent graduate of a middle-sized middle Atlantic university. I
wonder where he is now.



The Learning Resources Centrist does his centering in the South in a
prestigious institution of higher learning. (They do call themselves ``centrists''
sometimes, but it seems to me that a centrist, like a communist or formalist,
ought to be not one who {\itshape does} something about centers or centering,
but one who is committed to the principles of centers or centering. Well,
no matter.) His letter was, in fact, an objection to my objection to the
term Leaming Resources Center for library.



The educationist quoted in the last chapter, and also in the context
of ``values clarification,'' is a professor of educational psychology
in Southern California. ``Educational psychology'' is possible in
language, so why not in Southern California?



The source of the other citations is suggested in the text.



I should say, for those who might think these things unusual, that they
aren't and that they weren't difficult to find. They were chosen from among
hundreds of possible examples, almost any selection of which could have been
used to make the same point. Especially in education, government,
psychology, and the social sciences, but to some degree in every sort of
thoughtful endeavor, such writings are not exceptions; they are the rule.
They also suggest the rule under which we must all live someday unless
something changes.


\end{document}
