A story about C.K. Ogden

 I have known the name C.K. Ogden for decades without knowing about him.

Ogden’s name was associated with the first English translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. That the book was published at all seems to me to be close to a miracle. Ogden seems to have been that kind of person: interested in everything and interested in getting interesting ideas into broader circulation.

He’s probably best known for Basic English. The idea is to use English as the basis of a kind of universal language by stripping it down to a vocabulary of 850 words and limiting verb forms to 16. Ogden showed that you could express complicated ideas with a relatively small number of words.

I.A. Richards, an English writer and critic who taught at Harvard, wrote a book with Ogden, The Meaning of Meaning. He was asked how the book and Basic English came about.

Richards was delighted with the question because it had a clear answer. 

It happened exactly at eleven o'clock at night on November the eleventh, 1918, Armistice Day.

Richards was then at Cambridge University and was renting rooms from Ogden. Medical students had gone on a rampage and Ogden’s property had been damaged. As the two men were talking on the stairwell, they discovered both were interested in questions of meaning.

The conversation went on from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. 

We went on and on, and the whole of our book, The Meaning of Meaning, was talked out clearly in two hours.

Richards said Ogden was just like that. He had a wide circle of friends, and he would raid their minds.

He was very, very witty, a most unexpected, surprising man. He'd take off with anyone he thought knew all about X and keep him up to three o'clock in the morning. By that time he'd found out what he wanted to know about X and he could use it.

I love that story. Ideas change as they are seized and digested by different people. I think it shows the importance of having friends and having conversations among friends.

If I were asked what philosophy is, I might tell a version of this story.

• Source: B. Ambler Boucher and John Paul Russo, “An Interview With I.A. Richards”; The Harvard Crimson, March 11, 1969.