In 1973 I was teaching at Philadelphia Community College, which was located, at the time, in what was formerly a downtown department store. In 1972, which had been my first year there, I taught in a program for the benefit of weak readers who had entered the school. We used a text, which you can still find used, on Amazon, called “88 Passages to Develop Reading Comprehension.” Through careful study of paragraph organization and seeing the model, students were meant to grow in their ability to read complex materials.
(By the way, as an aside, as the result of a union contract, my salary went from $8000-a-year to $12,000-a-year. I’ll post in one of my “leftiest” rants why, even though I’m making much more a-year now, my salary hasn’t really gone up AT ALL in 37 years.)
(By the way, I’ll also write, later, why the faculty at Philly Community were such a very interesting crew of people, more interesting to me than the many significant scientists I’ve worked “around” (“with” would be too much of a stretch) for the last 25 years.
(By the way, I like “asides.”)
By the following year I was looking for materials to supplement the Developmental Reading course I was teaching, when I stumbled on a book called “The Use and Misuse of Language: Selected Essays from ETC: A Review of General Semantics.” It was edited by S.I. Hayakawa. Here’s what I’d known about S.I. Hayakawa:
1. He was President of San Francisco State College during the SDS strikes of 1968-1969. He was The Man.
2. Since I was still a naive kid (ok, 27) from Long Island, I think he was the first clearly Asian-American person I remember hearing who spoke without an Asian accent.
Later, I would use portions of Hayakawa’s wonderful book, “Language in Thought and Action,” in another course.
In this book is a chapter called “Semantic Difficulties in Communication.” In that chapter is a section called “Classifications of Patterns of Thought,” and [ stay with me ] in that section is a sub-section called “Patterns of Reasoning.” There was just a short section about the difference between the Paris Metro and the New York subway system that just kind of jumped out at me, and it was this:
The two subway systems are different because the two countries had different definitions of “needs of a city.” The Paris Metro makes a very good point-to-point grid, so that “no part of the city [is] deprived of a means of communication with all the other parts.” The city is easily traversed, but with no particular attention paid to density or the ultimate destination of the passengers. It is as if there were some abstract “city” being served by this transit system. The New York City subway system proceeded in a very different fashion. It’s goal was to convey passengers from home to work. If you have ever tried to take the subway from Brooklyn to Queens, you understand the difference. It takes a while to believe that you really have to go via Manhattan.
What was really so important to me was the complete negation of the phrase “It’s just semantics.” Here were two cities with two very different rapid transit systems resulting from underlying semantic distinctions of what “serving a city” might mean. And I’ve asked myself, over a long time, just how many outcomes in the world of my experience, in all of our experiences, are really the result of the nuanced definitions of things that we all hold. Maybe it’s really all about semantics.
There were two articles today in the New York Times Magazine that relate to this subject, one directly, one indirectly. The first is about how your mother tongue may well define how you perceive the world, an extension and redefinition of Benjamin Whorf’s hypothesis. The second, about “pre-schooler depression” resulting from how your mother’s tongue might well define how you perceive the world. I began to think about how psychological states might be the result of a set of internal definitions, unassailable, cut off from the outside, states for which, in a distortion of Henry James’ notion, everything is lost. (That requires a separate posting.) I realize, of course, that Transactional Analysis, the notion of “Tapes,” etc, may not be so different. But the specialized vocabulary of psychology is what I’m interested in here.
We all understand that words have meanings — words denote and connote. Inside the mind, a word’s meaning feels like a kind of fuzzy “cell” with a denotative center, and many, many radiating pathways and surrounding clouds. Some of the pathways are connected to other words-with-meanings. Those related words become “overtones” of the word we are using. A mind contains an immense collection of interacting definitions. When we communicate, there are lines, signalling pathways between my sum-of-all-my-connected-definitions and yours, a nexus, between my internal definition set and yours. Over time, I learn how well you understand me by the words that you respond with after I say something to you. I can tell if you “hear me,” or see things the way I do. Sometimes, I’m surprised when I say something, and a person’s response tells me that we are speaking mutually foreign languages, both called English.
Picture my definitions (they are stored somewhere in my brain but many, many Marvin Minskys have failed to really say how) trying to interpret your definitions, while we have a conversation. We have a sentence for this: “A meeting of minds.” Think about that for a second. How do we ever have such a meeting when the fuzzy parts of the definitions change with history, experience, age, country. My parents had a very large set of “children-of-immigrants” and “I-lived-through-the-great-depression” definitions through which they viewed, spoke, and filtered the world. I’m a child of the 60s. When my parents used the word “money,” I’m sure they did not share my definition of the word. As a child of the 60s, it’s such a profound pleasure to talk with people of the same age, with the same set of references, so that I’m not spending the whole conversation explaining myself and my definitions. You can easily guess that my word “music” means something very different from the word “music” coming from my dad’s mouth, despite some overlaps.
So, I’m curious about the feeling of having communicated. And I’m curious about the feeling of not having communicated. And I’m very interested in why these interchange attempts so often fail or feel unsatisfactory. And I’m interested in how our definitions torment, limit, support, and sustain us. And you might think about those two train systems, and the meaning of the word “for” when I say, “I’m writing this for you.”
This is a long enough first posting. I’m going to quit now.
mht
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