Words are malleable, and they can deceive

Rolf Goeth, Las Vegas

Wednesday, July 23, 2008 | 2 a.m.

David Brooks’ commentary in Thursday’s Las Vegas Sun, “Human behavior is, after all, a mystery,” is an excellent summation of a puzzling phenomenon. He breaks it down into (1) the genetic process, (2) environmental factors and (3) the fuzziness of words.

I’ll limit my comments to the meaning of words. Meanings change, sometimes frequently, sometimes dramatically. Consider the word “sanction,” from Latin through French to English. Originally it meant “to render sacred.” Not the way President Bush uses it. When he urges the world to sanction Iran, he wants to penalize that country. Bottom line: Meanings are in constant flux.

And yet words, in the hands of a master, can occasionally slice through time and place to touch a small portion of the ultimate reality. Case in point: Shakespeare’s “Bees to the honey/Moths to the flame.” Genetic determinism?

Here’s a little experiment for all the teachers of literature and creative writing. Distribute copies of the short story “The Glass Man” to your students, but not before you black out the name of the author. Ask them who wrote it. Most of them will probably say Ray Bradbury, the great American science fiction writer. Any fool can see that. Wrong! It was Cervantes, hundreds of years before Bradbury was born.

Unfortunately, the flux in the meaning of words more often leads to confusion, evasion, even deliberate deception. (Example: It depends on what the meaning of “is” is.)

Jargon in the soft sciences frequently hides ignorance (see especially “psychobabble”). Spouting jargon is like an octopus squirting ink to hide from a predator. What’s a sloppy thinker to do, if challenged? He can reply contemptuously that, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll, his words mean exactly what he says they mean, nothing more, nothing less.

It’s time for hard science to step in.