Word Play
What Happens When People Talk
Peter Farb
First annotation on .
12 quotes
Chapter 6
- It tormented the ancient logicians and was the delight of the satirists, such as Lucian, who wrote: “I will say in advance this one true thing, to wit, I am going to tell you lies.”Aug 7 2023 2:00AM
- Everyday speech acts in which lying occurs, such as tall tales and extended jokes, sometimes follow this pattern. A speaker begins a story with a somewhat unbelievable statement but immediately adds Now I’ll show you why that’s so. He then proceeds to support the first statement with a second apparently untrue sentence, which he bolsters by I know that sounds peculiar also, but I’ll tell you why it’s true. He keeps piling exaggeration upon exaggeration until his final sentence, in which he disowns his very first sentence either by wild hyperbole or by saying I wasn’t exactly accurate the way I began this story.Aug 7 2023 2:01AM
- If someone in my town greets me with How you feelin’ today, Mister Farb? I am likely to reply Fine, thanks, and yourself?—even though I might at that moment be suffering from flu, be hurrying to the drugstore to get my prescriptions refilled, and not be the least interested in how the person who greeted me is. But my Fine, thanks, and yourself? should not really be considered a lie. It is simply one of the stereotyped gambits offered me in my speech community’s greeting ritual. By selecting this gambit, I have not actually lied but rather have chosen a strategy whereby I can suppress further conversation about my health, with the result that I can continue on my way to the drugstore. If I had not chosen the gambit of the trivial lie but instead had replied truthfully I have a fever and headache and cough and my legs feel like they’re ready to collapse, I would have chosen a very poor option from the array of those open to me in the greeting interaction. Rather than suppressing further conversation, this option demands that the person who greeted me reply by expressing words of sympathy, whether or not he feels such an emotion: Gee, Mister Farb, I’m terribly sorry to hear that. Because as a native member of my speech community I unconsciously knew that he would have to express sympathy—and that I, further, would have to respond to it by continuing the conversation—I suppressed further interaction simply by replying to his initial greeting with the trivial lie Fine, thanks.Aug 7 2023 2:08AM
- The Vietnam War—not a war according to the Pentagon but an international armed conflict—inspired lying at a national level rarely seen before in history. The predominant strategy was the ornate euphemism—an effort to divert attention from the true horrors of death and destruction by labeling something the opposite of what it truly was. An aggressive attack by an armada of airplanes, which most speakers of English call simply an air raid, was instead spoken of as a momentary defensive strategy, a routine limited duration protective reaction. Defoliation of an entire forest, with the result that it may not sprout another green leaf for decades or even hundreds of years, was labeled a resources control program. The thirty-four dollars given to families of South Vietnamese civilians killed by mistake were called condolence awards, and bombing errors against friendly villages were termed navigation misdirection. Starving and homeless Vietnamese, fleeing from the horrors of war, did not seek survival in a refugee camp but instead discovered freshening experiences in what the Pentagon dubbed a new life hamlet or an Open Arms camp. A further strategy was the creation of a whole new set of “before” and “after” terms which bestowed tremendous dignity upon minor military objectives, but only after they had been destroyed. What before had been simply a straw-thatched hut became, after its bombardment, a structure. A sunken one-man dugout was elevated to a vessel, and a splintered set of logs thrown across a stream became a bridge; a gimcrack bomb-shelter, once destroyed, was referred to as a bunker or a network of tunnels.Aug 7 2023 2:10AM
Chapter 7
- Closely related to the unequal treatment of a minority language by a majority language is the unequal treatment many languages give to the two sexes. The Bible regards Eve as merely an offshoot from Adam’s rib—and English follows suit by the use of many Adam’s-rib words. The scientific name for both sexes of our species is the word for only one of them, Homo, “man” in Latin; our species is also referred to as human (derived from Homo) or mankind, two other words which similarly serve to make women invisible. The average person is always masculine (as in the man in the street) and so is the hypothetical person in riddles and in examination questions (If a man can walk ten miles in seven minutes, how many miles can he walk in twelve minutes?). The word he is often used as a common-gender pronoun, even though it is possible that a female is being referred to (as in When the vice-president of the company came to town, he…). If the antecedent is a high-prestige occupational role—such as vice-president, manager, doctor, director, and so forth—then the pronoun is very likely to be he, whereas if the antecedent is a secretary, nurse, or elementary-school teacher, the pronoun is apt to be she. In discussions among college faculty (usually a “he” word), students who cheat are often referred to as he and students who do not as she. The English language is riddled with other examples of conceptual categories which apply to one sex or the other. Males roar, bellow, and growl; females squeal, shriek, and purrAug 7 2023 2:14AM
- Even when the sexism is not built into the grammar and usage, as it is in French and English, the speech community often regards masculine values as the norm. Words like master and father have traditionally been those of leadership and power—as in master of my fate and the father of modern science—while feminine words are used to imply unpredictability or treachery, which is one reason why the U. S. Weather Bureau has given feminine names to hurricanes.Aug 7 2023 2:17AM
- Successive generations unconsciously absorb sexism in language because each speech community conveys to its children both a way to construct grammatical sentences and a value system for the use of its language. A young reader who sees in a school textbook The courageous pioneer defended his land forms a mental image of the pioneers that eliminates females—unless, of course, they are referred to elsewhere in the book by the qualified women pioneers. More often, though, history books refer to pioneer women as luggage, in such statements as The pioneers crossed the Plains with their wives, children, and personal belongings. The child learns about the history of our species—man or mankind—from the time of Peking man or Neanderthal man, even though a large number of the fossil skulls that have been unearthed are those of females.Aug 7 2023 2:18AM
- “Women and dogs and other impure animals are not permitted to enter.” The fact is that language merely reflects social behavior and is not the cause of it. The problem of woman’s status in English-speaking communities will not be solved by dismantling the language—but by changing the social structure. Even if it were in our power to legislate changes in the platitudes of words, the attitudes would nevertheless remain.Aug 7 2023 2:19AM
- Pidgin is not the corrupted form of a standard language—like the “broken” English spoken by an Italian tourist guide or that classic example of pseudo-pidgin, Me Tarzan, you Jane. Nor is it a kind of baby talk spoken by a plantation owner to his slaves, a master to his servants, or a merchant to his customers. And, finally, it is not a language that patronizingly makes concessions to the limited intelligence of “natives.” A pidgin can best be described as a language which has been stripped of certain grammatical features. It is a new language that is not the mother tongue of any of its users, and it usually survives only so long as members of diverse speech communities are in contact.Aug 7 2023 2:22AM
- When it comes to the important features of language—such as the grammatical formation of questions and commands or the patterns of subordinated sentences—pidgin has rules for them just like any other language has. Pidgin is not simply a random collection of ways of putting together sentences, but rather a system that allows its speakers to constantly create new sentences they have never heard before.Aug 7 2023 2:23AM
- A pidgin language, therefore, is a strategic response to a social situation. ItAug 7 2023 2:24AM
Chapter 16
- People who speak the same language can hate one another as easily as can people who speak unrelated languages—which emphasizes a point made over and over again in this book. It is impossible to abstract language from its environment of speakers—with their diverse and often conflicting political, economic, and religious concerns—and to claim that language will cure some ill or other in the body politic.Aug 7 2023 4:56AM