My father read a quarterly journal called ETC: A Review of General Semantics. I remember, as a teenager, finally noticing dozens of them in his office and asking about his interest.
He’d read Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity. Korzybski suggests that the conceptual framework we create with language is a map of reality, not reality. My father, who was drafted off a Tennessee farm and fought through the Battle of the Bulge, was interested in the mass movements of the 1930s. His unit liberated a concentration camp late in the war. He had a sense of how lives could be touched, changed and destroyed by propaganda — by bad conceptual maps.
My father was convinced that we have an obligation to look at the words and phrases we use to see where they come from. We should see if the language we use gives us a map that reflects the world we experience — or whether it reflects someone else’s prejudices, fears and grievances.
That inquiry is not etymology exactly, but something similar. It’s not like determining the provenance of a work of art exactly, but similar.
I wish we had a review of popular semantics.
No comments:
Post a Comment