Irrecoverably Dark
IN Joshua Whatmough's Language : A Modern Synthesis (Seeker and Warburg, 25s.) learned term hotly pursues learned term and all too often there is no clear indication of the way in which they are used. The same objec- tion can justly be made to the use of more common words. Mr. Whatmough, Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Harvard, avows that he does not write for experts. But time and time again it would take a statistician or a neurologist or a communi- cations engineer to see what technical con- cept or confused notion thereof lay at the back of his mind. In this book, then, both the novel and the traditional doctrines of philo- logy are obscured. Some are made impene- trably dark. When he apparently, though not certainly, deviates into sense, the professor's views are either naive or limited or both. Meaning, for instance, is, as science teaches him, only one kind of activity. It is, in every case,' quasi-electronic operations in the brain. But, in fact, it is the multiplicity of the things we do with language, that takes our eye when it is not blinded with science or the blanket phrase: e.g., 'Every word in language signifies something.' And it is one or other of these countless kinds of activity that we're talking about when we consider, in this way or that, what someone means. There is in this book, I grant, an account of the uses of language. But these, so it would seem, are different from meaning. And they are, in Professor 081' mough's view, really only four in number:1/ inexpert intelligent won't learn much from book. Nor, indeed, will the trained soldiers
DAVID
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