Perhaps I can offer my second suggestion in a somewhatnlighter vein, though the suggestion itself is no less serious. Itnis that we strive eagerly to resurrect the English language,nnow virtually defunct. Many people have called attention tonthe decline of the language and have sought the root causenof the malady; my own diagnosis is simple laziness. That isnto say, we have ceased to be willing to work hard to form andnexpress our thoughts with precision; and we have also, whennreading or listening, stopped paying close enough attentionnto know whether anyone else is saying just what he means.nFor instance, how many of you have observed that Presidentsnof the United States, when asked specific questionsnabout such matters as unemployment or inflation or foreignnpolicy, have developed the habit of replying, “We feel”ninstead of “I think”? The gap between group feeling andnindividual thinking is, after all, rather wide. Maybe theynknow what they are saying, and maybe not; either way, it isnworrisome.nThe best analysis of the decline of the language that Inknow is one made some years ago by George Orwell. Orwellnbegins by focusing on the use of metaphors. A newlyninvented metaphor, he points out, assists thought, andnliberates it, by conjuring an image, while a metaphor that isntechnically “dead” {e.g., “iron resolution”) has in effectnbecome an ordinary word and can generally be used withoutnloss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is anhuge dump of worn-out metaphors that have lost theirnevocative power and are used merely because they save thentrouble of using phrases that fit — that is, thinking. Metaphorsnare often used without knowledge of their meaning;nfor example, most of you have been on tenterhooks fromntime to time, but how many of you know why a tenter hasnhooks? Moreover, incompatible metaphors are frequentlynmixed, a sure sign that the speaker or writer is not interestednin what he is saying; a colleague of mine once wrote that,nafter Roger Williams was exiled from Massachusetts, hen”floundered around in the woods” for a while. Too, thenmetaphors get garbled. In a single segment of NationalnPublic Radio’s Morning Edition I recently heard thenfollowing: “collapsed like a deck of cards,” “the issue thatnbroke the straw,” and “living high hog off the land.” Wenhave also witnessed metaphor inflation, the use of superlativesnsuch as “holocaust” or “genocide” to describe minornmishaps; we recenfly commemorated a “disaster” in whichnno one was hurt, namely Three Mile Island. Last summernthe media reported a budget “summit” meeting in Houston,nTexas, scarcely ten feet above sea level.nAnd that is not the worst of it. We tend to abandon short,nhomely words and substitute, whenever possible, hybridizednLatin or Greek words, such as “hybridized.” We are fastnlosing all sense of numbers agreement: media and data arentreated as singular, and none, each, and every are treated asnplural. We have lost the distinction between shall and will, Inand me, who and whom, like and as, less and fewer. And wenare befogged by bureaucrats, politicians, and self-stylednvictims who deliberately use words to obscure their intent.nThe result, in general, is an increase in slovenly andnvague language. But our greatest fault is in resorting tonmeaningless words when we do not know what we reallynmean. This is most starkly seen in subjects without anconcrete referent, such as the history of art criticism and thentheory of literary criticism. Behold this example from PoetrynQuarterly:nGomfort’s catholicity of perception and image,nstrangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exactnopposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evokenthat trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting atna cruel, an inexorable serene hmelessness. . .nBut the rest of us are equally guilty, especially whenndealing with current political questions. When we sayn”free,” we mean popularly elected. “Democratic” hasnceased to have anything to do with a form of government; itnmeans “good,” just as “racist” means bad. “Equal rights fornoppressed minorities” means special privileges for organizedninterest groups. Then again, the radicals of the late 60’s andnearly 70’s — who now dominate the academy — taught usnthat “liberate” means capture, that “free speech” meansnmandatory cursing, that “nonviolent” means mob action,nthat “nonnegotiable demands” mean let’s talk it over, andnthat 52 percent of the population is a minority.nOrwell gives an example of his translation of a passage ofngood English into a passage of modern English. First, anwell-known verse from Ecclesiastes:nI returned, and saw under the sun, that the race isnnot to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neithernyet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men ofnunderstanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; butntime and chance happeneth to them all.nHere is the way a professor or a government functionarynmight translate that simple, powerful, and beautiful passage:nObjective consideration of contemporarynphenomena compels the conclusion that success ornfailure in competitive societal activities bears nonnecessary correlation to, and exhibits no tendencynto be commensurate with, innate capacity, but that’na considerable element of the unpredictable mustninvariably be taken into account.nSoulwise, as E.B. White said in translating Tom Paine, thesenare trying times.nThe attraction of this ponderous way of speaking andnwriting is that it is easy because it avoids thought. It isneasier — even quicker, once you have the habit—to say “Innmy opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that” than itnis to say “I think.” Too, if you use ready-made phrases, younnot only don’t have to hunt for words, you also don’t have tonbother with the rhythms and rhymes of your sentences,nsince these phrases are generally so arranged as to benmellifluous. One shirks all responsibility simply by emptyingnone’s mind and letting the cant of the day come crowdingnin. It will construct your sentences for you, and even thinknyour thoughts for you. Whenever you encounter a personnwho does not talk in such cliches, who does not think inncliches, who does not, in short, live in a reduced state ofnconsciousness, you will find that he is some kind of rebel,nexpressing his private opinions and not a “party line.”nMy third suggestion is a bit more involved, and possiblynmore difficult, than learning to keep an open mind and tonthink and speak clearly in the mother tongue. It is this: wenmust learn, anew, how to think nonscientifically in dealingnwith nonscientific things. “Wait a minute!” you may say;nnnFEBRUARY 1991/15n