Semantics

THE TYRANNY OF WORDS--Stuart Chase --Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

In 1914 a 26-year-old Boston accountant named Stuart Chase took his bride on a strange honeymoon. They poked through slums, pretended to be pitiful specimens of the unemployed, checking up on working conditions in sweatshops. The natural result was not a baby but a book. Stuart Chase, who thus unconventionally introduced his bride to facts he considered fundamental, has spent his life introducing himself and his growing public to facts of deeper & deeper import. Primarily a popularizer of other men's ideas, Author Chase expresses each new enthusiasm in startling journalese. Without the authority of the learned or the wise, he has an indignant curiosity that is infectious. There are no satisfactory answers to be found in Stuart Chase. But at least he raises the Question. Five years ago he flung wide the question of "Technocracy." Last week he broached his biggest yet.

The question, which higher brows than Chase's had dubbed semantics, is: What is the connection between words and reality? Readers who knew their Stuart Chase expected a lively piling up of rough-hewn evidence, the sinister emergence of a nigger, and a whooping pursuit. They were not disappointed. The Tyranny of Words is a typical Stuart Chase book: popular, suggestive, controversial, a racy simplification of a vast problem.

Semantics (defined as "the science of meanings") has been criticized principally because its theoreticians have made such sweeping claims for it as a social cureall, and because books about it are hard to read. Semanticist Chase makes his claims as sweeping as any, but his book is easy reading. "A brief grounding in semantics," he vouches, "besides making philosophy unreadable, makes unreadable most political speeches, classical economic theory, after-dinner oratory, diplomatic notes, newspaper editorials, treatises on pedagogics and education, expert financial comment, dissertations on money and credit . . . Great Thoughts from Great Thinkers in general."

But a brief grounding in semantics is a life work in itself. Modern semantics dates from 1923, when two English professors. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, wrote a book called The Meaning QJ Meaning, followed by Ogden's invention of an 850-word vocabulary called Basic English. Indicative of the complexity of semantics is the fact that while Ogden is an orthologist and psychologist and Richards is an esthetician, important contributions have been made by a Polish mathematician, Count Alfred Korzybski, and a Harvard physicist, Percy Williams Bridgman. Semantics ranges from the equator of Basic English through the lush tropics of political bunkum to the North Pole of James Joyce's word-coining.

To prove his claim, Stuart Chase gives a digest of semantic authorities and then shows how meaningless in the light of their studies are some passages from 'such pundits as Plato, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, President Roosevelt, Walter Lippmann, Henry Ford. He even damns an excerpt from his own writings. As his only ''operational test" he asked 100 people, ranging from schoolboys to Senators, what "fascism" meant to them. They all disliked it, but they had 15 different concepts of what they disliked, including that of a housewife who thought it was "a Florida rattlesnake." Popular ideas of "com-munism," "democracy," "capitalism," says Chase, would show as much confusion. Users of such terms, he declares, "are like motorists trying to explore Maine guided by a map of Texas."

Main source of this confusion, says Chase, comes from the "semantic illiteracy" of using such words as though they had an actual point of reference in the physical world, whereas in fact they are in the same category as the "souls" which savages give to trees, rivers and the like. And since language is the main instrument in regulating social relationships, the result of this word-witchery is to make men's actions also meaningless. Instead of giving souls to trees, modern man, avers Chase, personifies "national honor," "neutrality," "capital," "labor," "corporations." "It would surely be a rollicking sight," he hoots, "to see the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey in pursuit of happiness at a dance hall."

As an attack on loose thinking parading as profundity, on hollow rhetoric offered as a guide to social action, on fakes, phonies, pomposities, stuffed shirts, pedants and wordmongers in general, The Tyranny of Words will to most readers make tonic good sense. But, as with most of Stuart Chase's writing, they are likely to be more impressed with his devastating diagnosis than with his cureall. Picturing present-day human communications as a telephone switchboard with all the wires crossed, Stuart Chase can only look hopefully toward a distant future when, through the rigorous application of semantics, the connection between minds will be quick and clear.

For the present, he offers only such concrete examples as how semantics enabled him to cure himself of a fear of "snakes," such hypothetical examples as how it might keep a man from committing suicide. In the mind of the would-be suicide, suggests Chase, would occur a semantic Stop-Look-Listen! monolog like this: "This is bad; this is painful, depressing, almost intolerable. But my life, my organism, is a process, always changing ... no two contexts are tho same. . . . Snap out of it, brother, snap out of it! Prepare for the next context. . . ."

Far more effective are Stuart Chase's semantic analyses of such lofty nonsense as Goebbels': "The Aryan Fatherland, which has nursed the souls of heroes, calls upon you for the supreme sacrifice . . . which will echo forever down the corridors of history." Translated into Chase's semantics: "The blab blab, which has nursed the blab of blabs, calls upon you for the blab blab . . . which will echo blab down the blabs of blab." Or as when he turns his semantic searchlight on the juggled "absolutes" of businessmen's pronouncements: "When," says Chase, "a great banker says with satisfaction, 'Production is increasing, look at the curve' [not specifying whether he means armaments or consumer's goods] he might equally well observe, 'Blue-haired mermaids are increasing, look at the curve.' "

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